HIGHLIGHTS OF ROKLIVE 2021

June 22-23, 2021

A Special Report by the editors of Control

PLEX, FIIX ACQUISITIONS BRIDGING IT AND OTBy Mike Bacidore, Control Design

Over the past year, operational changes in pro-ductivity and flexibility have become two of manufacturers’ biggest challenges. To meet these,

Rockwell Automation has continued to evolve its own tech-nologies. In addition, key acquisitions of Plex Systems and Fiix have boosted and expanded its offerings to help com-panies bring IT and operational technology (OT) together.

“We see a growing need to improve production and improve compliance,” said Rockwell Automation Chair-man and CEO Blake Moret who spoke during the June 29 keynote address of ROKLive 2021, the company’s virtual conference exploring the explosion of digital technol-ogy in manufacturing today. “Companies are looking to upgrade their solutions to a modern, cloud-based manufacturing execution system,” Moret said. “The Plex platform is designed to accelerate digital transformation, and it’s perfectly aligned with Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk offering. No one is better equipped to bring IT and OT together.”

Rockwell Automation is merging IT and OT to bring the benefits of The Connected Enterprise to the produc-tion system, explained Tessa Myers, vice president and general manager of produc-tions & operations managements solutions at Rockwell Automation. “Our controllers and intelligent devices are the building blocks of those systems,” she said. “We thrive in data-rich environments.”

Cloud apps promise faster time to valueThe $2.22 billion acquisition of Plex Systems adds cloud-native, smart MES capabilities to the Rockwell Automation portfolio. Plex

offers a single-instance, multi-tenant software-as-a-ser-vice (SaaS) manufacturing platform operating at scale, including advanced MES, quality and supply-chain man-agement capabilities. Plex has more than 700 customers and manages more than 8 billion transactions per day. Its software capabilities will be further differentiated by Rockwell Automation’s global market access, comple-mentary industry expertise and ability to turn real-time data into actionable insights.

“This acquisition will accelerate our strategy to bring The Connected Enterprise to life, driving faster time to value for our customers as they increasingly adopt cloud solutions to improve resilience, agility and sustainability in their operations,” added Moret. “Combining Plex’s cutting-edge cloud technology with Rockwell’s existing software portfolio and domain expertise will add customer value and create more ways to win. The acquisition will also accelerate our software revenue growth and strengthen our annual recurring revenue streams.”

Plex’s platform is designed to help customers to connect, automate, track and analyze their operations and connected

“We see a growing need to improve production and improve compliance.” Rockwell Automation Chairman and CEO Blake Moret explained how the company’s recent acquisitions of Plex Systems and Fiix expand the portfolio of offerings to bring the IT-OT data gap.

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

supply chains, which could satisfy manufacturers’ needs to increase production and improve resilience, while driving efficiency and compliance. “Plex has always been more than a company,” said Bill Berutti, CEO of Plex. “We have been a leader in the movement to smart manufacturing and a trusted partner to more than 700 manufacturing companies around the globe. Joining forces with Rockwell is great for our customers, our partners and our employees as we move to expand our reach and impact and accel-erate our mission to bring manufacturing to the cloud.”

Plex will be reported as part of Rockwell Automation’s Software and Control operating segment which provides hardware and software offerings for the design, opera-tion and maintenance of production automation and management systems.

“When customers bring together production schedule information, our customers see big quality improvements,” said Berutti, noting 80% faster inventory returns and 18% higher levels of production output. “The value of Rock-well’s position on the shop floor is a huge source of that value. Plex allows our customers to make decisions in real time. With Rockwell, we’re going to be able to turn the volume on that up to 11.”

Rockwell Automation, together with Plex, is already working with three companies to take their data to the next level.

Southwire is global manufacturer that found itself with islands of automation and disparate systems. By imple-menting an OT network and pulling together data with context, powered by FactoryTalk Edge Gateway, South-wire implemented the right key performance indicators (KPIs) in a true edge-to-cloud solution that brought the right information to the right person at the right time.

Norbord makes oriented strand board (OSB) and other lumber materials. Norbord needed a predictive model. But industrial analytics require actionable data in real time. Its analytics approach was tailored to improve uptime and reduce scrap.

Fonterra, a global dairy producer, implemented a combination of edge and cloud analytics from Rockwell Automation and Microsoft across 10 sites to create over-all equipment effectiveness (OEE) calculations that are available to employees at various levels so they can make better decisions.

“At the device, control, edge or cloud level, there are oppor-tunities,” explained Myers. “FactoryTalk Hub is our newest addition to our portfolio. The tools and applications enable developers to bring designs to market and enable operators

and management to drive operational improvements. Plex fits into FactoryTalk Hub to track and analyze. Our next genera-tion of software solutions will help you work better every day.”

Cloud-based MES + CMMS, tooTogether with the advanced asset maintenance and management capabilities provided by the recent acqui-sition of Fiix, a provider of cloud-based maintenance management systems, Rockwell Automation boasts an explanding portfolio of cloud-native solutions for cus-tomers’ production needs.

“Fiix helps maintenance teams schedule, organize and track equipment maintenance,” explained James Novak, CEO of Fiix. “We made it our mission to not only drive maintenance, but to navigate the change. In a post-COVID world, our customers’ jobs have gotten even more difficult. We’re talking about digital transforma-tion in maintenance—from run-to-failure to preventive to condition-based to predictive. It’s a data-maturity jour-ney. When you get into condition-based and predictive maintenance, you’re getting into data.”

Novak cited a three-step process that Fiix has identified to make implementation easy.1. Ease of deployment, management and scalability: “It’s

extremely easy to roll out,” said Novak. “Updates to the software are rolled out seamlessly. The cloud-based software is set up like a subscription. All of the value happens during the subscription. We are fundamen-tally tied together through the journey.”

2. Ease of use: “Getting insights from the data is hard if your people are not using the system properly or fully,” cautioned Novak. “Ease of use is paramount. The mo-bile workforce is becoming increasingly important. Technicians don’t spend much time in the back office; they’re in the field. You don’t want to be in a situation where information is only being logged at the end of the day. You want to equip your team with a system that works for them. Customers are using Fiix in con-junction with SAP Plant Maintenance (PM).”

3. Ease of connectivity: “Our integration hub lets you connect to business systems or collect data from sen-sors, ensuring KPIs across the enterprise. We’re able to connect Fiix to anything within days, not weeks. We had a packaging company customer that did an imple-mentation remotely during COVID.”

The ROKLive keynote presentations summarized in this report remain available on demand through October 2021.

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

SUSTAINABILITY’S GOOD FOR BUSINESS, TOOBy Anna Townshend, Control Design

“Leaders should look at efficiency and sustain-ability as mutually beneficial goals,” said Allie Schwertner, sustainability and energy leader at

Rockwell Automation. “Improving the efficiency of opera-tions will reduce waste, which improves the sustainability of processes. This introduces cost benefits, which can then be reinvested in future projects.”

Schwertner spoke as moderator for a keynote session on “Sustainability: From Vision to Impact,” at the ROKLive 2021 virtual event. The session visited with Rockwell Auto-mation partners that have made sustainability a priority and have committed to a positive feedback loop to continu-ously make processes more efficient and more sustainable.

“In order to help customers meet sustainability goals, it’s important that we hold ourselves to a high standard,” Schwertner continued. “Everything needs to be managed to maintain high sustainability standards in areas such as energy consumption, operational efficiency, waste and recy-cling.” She welcomed three projects and organizations that are focused on sustainability for waste, energy and water.

Chemical recycling feeds a circular economyAt packaging company, Sealed Air, the makers of Cryovac food packaging and Bubble Wrap protective packaging, “We have a very high sense of purpose—to leave the world better than we found it,” said Sergio Pupkin, growth and strategy

officer at Sealed Air. The company has made a pledge that by 2025 100% of its packaging will be recyclable or renewable.

“We want to recycle more in order to drive that circular economy, but the recycling stream for many of our prod-ucts are still under development,” Pupkin said. So Sealed Air is driving some of that development with its custom-ers, who share a similar recycling journey. “We have the same problems that they have,” Pupkin said.

The transformation into smart factories and beyond would not be possible without automation technology and the partnership with Rockwell Automation, Pupkin added.

Ron Cotterman, vice president of innovation and sus-tainability at Sealed Air, took attendees on a tour of the company’s innovation center at its Charlotte campus. The tour focused on three areas: one of its automated packag-ing lines and two of the labs where the company makes new types of packaging material and recycles plastic back into new materials.

At the food packaging lab, a Cryovac auto loader auto-matically inserts blocks of cheese into the package and

“Improving the efficiency of operations will reduce waste, which improves the sustainability of processes. This introduces cost benefits, which can then be reinvested in future projects.” Rockwell Automation’s Allie Schwertner introduced three of the company’s customers who are leveraging Rockwell technology to reduce the environmental impact of their operations.

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

seals them, “with a labor- and energy-efficient process,” Cotterman said. “Before that equipment was available, you would have seen a lot more people manually pack-aging that cheese into those plastic bags, but because of that automated equipment, it happens in a fraction of a second,” he said.

Next, in a small-scale processing lab, “This is where we demonstrate that we can incorporate recycled content into our products and that our products are recyclable, as part of our 2025 pledge,” Cotterman said. The com-pany’s iconic product, Bubble Wrap, for example, is now loaded with recycled content. “We take the same plastic resin that’s used to make it originally and use it again and again,” he said. Sealed Air can also use mate-rial that comes from the food side of the business (and all the scraps that are generated there) and recycle that material into the protective side of the business, where it makes products like Bubble Wrap.

“We go through a series of process steps to melt it down and to make new plastic material that performs as if it was brand-new, virgin material,” Cotterman said. The lab is where Sealed Air does its experiments and the essential R&D work for material innovation at a small scale, before it’s practiced at the large-scale facilities. “This capability is brand-new within our industry,” Cotterman said.

The final stop on the Sealed Air tour was the chemis-try lab, what Cotterman called the “future of recycling,” where the chemistry is done to make plastic recyclable. “Plastic, whether in the form of a tray or film or bag, can be recycled into raw materials, such as this oil here, that can then be used to make a new plastic. We call that advanced recycling or chemical recycling,” he added.

“We do it because it’s not only good for the planet, but it’s also good for business,” Cotterman said.

Reducing the compressed air carbon footprintCompressed air systems are crucial to many production processes, but they often represent a plant’s largest energy consumer. Case Controls, which provides control solutions for the compressed air industry, has long been working to help companies reduce their carbon footprint with auto-mation. “We were always about energy reduction from a cost standpoint. When the green movement started, we were already doing that. We were already working with our customers to help them reduce energy, save costs and have a good return on investment,” said Lou York, director of Case Controls. The company also has solutions already

built to help customers reduce energy consumption, with-out reinventing the wheel.

Case offers local controls on individual compressors, or its full suite of products to control an entire plant system. “We manage the amount of horsepower you have online in order to meet the plant demand,” York said.

Over its 30 years, the company has reduced a significant amount of energy usage at a number of large manufactur-ing plants. “But having only done a fraction of plants, the opportunity to reduce energy consumption in industry remains a large opportunity,” York said.

Devin Sullivan, engineering manager at Case Con-trols, showed off a number of Case products at its R&D and quality control lab, including a PLC-based control system for a centrifugal air compressor for an automotive manufacturer and another version going to a power plant. Products are tested, including exercising every I/O, the start/stop modulation of the inlet and bypass valve, and monitoring vibrations, temperatures and pressures.

Case can also retrofit old systems with its suite of prod-ucts. “The retrofits are designed to replace and establish the same footprint as what the compressor OEM control system takes up inside the panel,” Sullivan explained. “We design and engineer a retrofit that is literally plug-and-play.”

From reclamation to revenueWhere Dr. Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute at West Virginia University, grew up in western Pennsylvania, all the big rivers and the small streams were dead from acidic mine drainage. Today, his work at West Virginia University is cleaning up the environment and those waters from the legacy mines that continue to leach contamination. Acid mine drainage typically happens when pyrite in coal is exposed to oxygen in the air and water, reacting to form sulfuric acid, Ziemkiewicz said.

In 2015, the U.S. Dept. of Energy showed an interest in identifying sources of critical minerals and rare earth elements. “I talked to people in the industry. I accessed some old data sets and turns out there were a lot of rare earths in acid mine drainage that no one had ever looked at before,” Ziemkiewicz said.

Over a period of about four-and-a-half years, the uni-versity developed a process for extracting the rare earth metals. “In order to make this into a commercial product, you have to be able to put feedstock in, hit some buttons and have good stuff come back out the end of it,” Ziemkie-wicz said. “We couldn’t do this without Rockwell providing

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

that automation, the sensors and control technology that make the process work.”

The session then toured two West Virginia sites making use of the technology to address acid-mine drainage con-tamination, including a centralized, integrated acid-mine drainage treatment plant that was built through a special reclamation fund managed by the West Virginia Depart-ment of Environment. The plant cleans up forfeited and abandoned mines sites and has restored aquatic life to many waters in the area.

And at “Site #834,” a unit is being built to do both rec-lamation work on the contaminated waters and extract

the rare earth elements for profit. “It is strictly treating the water coming off the #834 site that was previously contaminating the headwaters of the Potomac River,” Ziemkiewicz said. “The #834 site is the first integrated demonstration of our technology.” Most importantly, the process is doing reclamation work, and the treat-ment process itself creates a revenue stream to support the work.

The full ROKLive presentation, “Sustainability: From Vision to Impact,” on which this article is based remains available on demand through October 2021.

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

INSIGHTS DRIVING INDUSTRY INNOVATIONBy Chris McNamara, Smart Industry

During his opening keynote presentation at ROKLive 2021, Rockwell Automation CEO Blake Moret explained the company’s mission of con-

necting customers’ imaginations with the possibilities of technology to deliver real business results.

Heady stuff, for sure. Chirayu Shah, Rockwell’s director of cloud services,

then briefly addressed the “explosion of new technology” that is enabling unprecedented innovation to handle the ever-complicating supply chain and a customer base that increasingly demands reliability, variety and new capabili-ties with digital solutions.

At the core of both of these introductions was insight—and demand—fueling progress, which led nicely into Andrew Ellis’ ROKLive presentation, titled “Insights Driving Innovation,” in which Rockwell Automation’s director of global information solution technical con-sultants explained the connection between insight and innovation and showed how digital technologies make it easier—for everyone—to access, understand and leverage critical information. That easier access is changing the manner in which we all can discover, create, make and sell products.

Ellis began by describing a recent part-nership between Rockwell Automation and Microsoft with the goal of develop-ing digital-transformation solutions to empower automation engineers by quick-ening the data-migration process. The joint project team focused on customer business outcomes achievable with Rock-well Automation’s connected-enterprise

approach, encompassing all of the techniques and tech-nologies at the heart of the ROKLive event.

Past experiences inform future possibilitiesThe director explained how this project used the pro-duction facility at Rockwell Automation’s Milwaukee, Wis., headquarters to demonstrate how deeper access to contextualized data enables quicker, sharper adaptations to obstacles. And in looking to develop future gains, the team decided to look backward; they determined they needed to first understand the benefits of digitalization and automation through history, referencing Theodore Roosevelt’s quote “The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future.”

They discovered that technology decisions and strategies that were made over the past few hundred years are actually quite similar to those at play today. “It’s all about where we invest time and capital to meet customer demands with the current infrastructure, people and processes,” said Ellis.

“The processes haven’t really changed, but the technologies and systems have.” Rockwell Automation’s Andrew Ellis discussed how, despite the new and much faster digital support systems industry now has at its disposal, the decision-making strategies themselves have remained remarkably constant.

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

They looked to the Third Industrial Revolution to better understand converting raw materials into finished goods, how to make processes more efficient, how to constantly exceed customer expectations and provide solid return on investment. “The processes haven’t really changed,” he said. “But the technologies and systems have.”

What jumped out at the team was the ability for digital-powered innovation to quicken sluggish manufacturing processes. “The concept of ‘failing fast’ did not exist back then,” Ellis said. “The data, tools and methods to support that did not exist.”

They’re available now.Software has replaced paper. Computer-aided design has replaced pencils and drafting boards. Computer-integrated manufacturing enables the smart scheduling of the produc-tion line and a greater ability to track operations. Process historians eliminate the need for manual data reporting. The digital twin is being used to not just predict outcomes, but also as a simulated physical asset to test new scenarios in a risk-free environment.

And as manufacturers adopt new technologies, Ellis beamed, new capabilities emerge. (That shouldn’t sur-prise anyone who has worked in industry for any length of time.) Adopting tech solves immediate problems while uncovering future optimizations. Data silos get merged. MES data is paired with historical time-series data. Digital twins feed into digital threads. Smart phones put unprec-edented computing power in the palms of the working man and woman.  

Ellis used augmented reality (AR) as a prime exam-ple, admitting to being unsure where this technology

fit when it first emerged. Today he is a huge advocate for AR’s capabilities with complex assemblies or remote field workers or to quicken training on, say, the removal of parts from a line. The same goes for artificial intel-ligence and machine learning, which the presenter believes will drive consistent operations and boost pro-ductivity and quality in more ways than even those technologies’ cheerleaders believe.  

Data access fueling innovationTools are great. But innovative solutions are demanded. “The fundamental premise behind all of this is access to data,” said Ellis. “That is the essential piece to the con-nected enterprise, which is fueling innovation.”

Innovation for Rockwell Automation, of course, but also for its global audience of customers. “Our message is that we are on the same path as many of our manufacturing customers. They can look to us to see how we are apply-ing these concepts.”

Ellis again referenced Rockwell Automation’s Milwau-kee controller production facility in which they are using our own technologies to manufacturer the tools that cus-tomers can use to optimize their individual efforts. “By implementing these approaches, we are seeing inventory reductions, reduced lead time and increased on-time deliv-eries,” Ellis said. “We are bringing to life the concept of the connected-enterprise production system, and we have just scratched the surface of our capabilities.”

Andrew Ellis’ full ROKLive presentation, entitled “Insights Driving Innovation,” remains available on demand through October 2021.

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

RESILIENCE AGAINST SUPPLY CHAIN SHOCKSBy Jim Montague, Control

Beyond its devastating human toll and healthcare impacts, the COVID-19 pandemic has been no friend to businesses and economies either.

And, even as vaccinations make an impact on infection rates, manufacturers and consumers in many regions and industries continue to suffer from shortages of raw materials, intermediate parts and other products, which continue to hinder the recovery of their downstream cli-ents and customers.

“The past year and a half have been challenging in many dimensions for us and our clients both personally and professionally,” said Chad Markle, principal and global director of Kalypso, a Rockwell Automation com-pany and digitalization services provider. “We continue to face shocks to our own supply chains,” he continued. “These include everything from shipping and transporta-tion bottlenecks to crippling ransomware attacks to raw material and labor shortages, but we put them all under the heading of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA. It can seem like there’s no ready play-book for dealing with this VUCA world, but there’s also some reason for hope and optimism.”

Markle presented “Three key actions for supply chain resilience” at the ROKLive 2021 online conference. (His presentation remains available on demand through October 2021.)

Flexible production speeds responsesTo resolve some of these snags and shocks, Markle reported that some manufacturing leaders are trying to build greater agility, resilience and sustainability into their supply-chain processes, and develop more rapid access to actionable infor-mation, which can allow them to respond more effectively when problems arise.

“We’re trying to help in three main areas: changes in customer demand; changes in staffing and labor; and changes in materials,” said Markle. “For example, changes in demand drive significant troubles for supply-chain lead-ers. During lockdowns, customers shift where they shop, and how and what they purchase. Volatile demand also occurs in industrial supply chains, with rapidly rising and ebbing demand for petroleum, lumber, steel and semicon-ductors, just to name a few.

“Our clients who are weathering these changes in demand are using two main strategies: flexible manufac-turing for more rapid changeovers, and better supplier integration. Flexible manufacturing is all about the ability to adapt quickly and create a seamless flow from need to

“We’re trying to help in three main areas: changes in customer demand; changes in staffing and labor; and changes in materials.” Chad Markle discussed how Rockwell Automation and its Kalypso consulting arm are helping customers to deal with supply-chain volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

delivery. This means suppliers must replace rigid operating models with levels of controls and responses once thought impossible. Our leading clients aren’t only redesigning their factories so they can switch models and products more quickly, but in the automotive industry, for example, they’re going from changeovers of robots and software in four to six weeks to doing it overnight. This makes it a lot easier to handle volatility.”

Markle added that flexible production that can alleviate supply chain snags typically requires suppliers to imple-ment one, global manufacturing operations management (MOM) system and other software than can harmonize their operations by alerting them to assembly line changes, local training needs and other issues.

“MOM lets them effectively manage disruptions. Man-ufacturers facing VUCA and responding with flexible manufacturing can also gain value by integrating their sup-pliers, such as working more closely with their engineering experts and contractors to get preassembled modules, instead of just a box of parts,” explained Markle. “For example, one of our clients is a toy company with factories in Asia that collaborated on new designs by sharing their actual CAD models and geometries in near-real-time among their design-ers, engineers, suppliers and marketers; partnering with their management teams; and setting up a collaborative, internal, digital platform. This enabled them to reduce their data management and transaction times by up to 30%, speed up designs and turnarounds, and reduce costs.”

Smarter staffing Of course, another major impact of COVID-19 has been layoffs and unemployment as businesses closed or curtailed operations, compounded by persistent staffing shortages upon reopening due to the many dislocated workers who found other jobs or retired early. In addition, even when they could fill positions, many employers are now facing much higher ratios of less-skilled employees, more staff in new and unfamiliar roles, and costly shift-scheduling difficulties.

“The VUCA world needs more workforce enablement and labor-supporting technology. One client we work with is using advanced analytics and a ‘Moneyball’ strategy on their shop floor, which is similar to the book and movie

about the Oakland Athletics baseball team, which used data analytics to build a successful team from underval-ued players,” said Markle. “They track staff availability and skillsets, feeding analytical models to determine who’s best able to run particular equipment at any point in time. This streamlines tasks and scheduling, and is improving productivity, scrap and worker satisfaction.

“Some companies are also supplementing their staffs with robots and automatic guided vehicles (AGVs),” he said. “One of our clients, Symbotic, is showing how its autonomous robots can perform untethered travel among storage racks in clients’ distribution centers.”

Analytics assist materialsMarkle added that VUCA problems related to deviations in raw materials can also be tamed by data analytics applied in the form of product lifecycle management (PLM) software, model predictive control (MPC), artificial intel-ligence (AI), and even “chaos engineering” functions that can simulate problems in production systems to make sure they’re running properly.

“For example, Netflix runs Chaos Monkey software through its systems and adds simulated problems to pro-actively identify process volatility,” explained Markle. “It even uses real-world production data for its simulations, so it can deal with the issues Chaos Monkey finds on its own terms, and further improve its ecosystem by enabling it to respond better.”

Similarly, Markle added that PLM is a sophisticated software platform that uses digital production definitions, worker management functions and advanced visualiza-tion. “These capabilities let users manage their production and equipment lifecycles with a digital thread they can use to make control changes,” said Markle. “Likewise, PLM serves as an orchestration backbone, but it can also track materials, parts and bills of material. These capabili-ties are important because we’re also seeing a shortfall in semiconductor chips, for example, which is forcing some automotive manufacturers to leave blindspot-monitors out of their cars. More resilient supply chains can reduce these problems by making users more agile. This is why Kalypso and Rockwell Automation are committed to these next-generation supply chains.”

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

CLOUD SUITE TO UNIFY MANUFACTURING APPSBy Mike Bacidore, Control Design

“Almost every aspect of your life involves cloud in some form or fashion,” began Anoop Mohan, managing director of cloud services at Rock-

well Automation. His implied question was clear: So why should manufacturing be any different?

During the ROKLive 2021 virtual conference, Mohan led a preview session for the new FactoryTalk Hub, a Rockwell Automation product suite designed to enable industrial customers across the industrial lifecycle with cloud-enabled software-as-a-services (SaaS) products driven by simplicity as the top objective.

From Microsoft Office and Adobe to your payroll system, a lot of your activities at work are already connected to the cloud, noted Mohan. According to Forbes, 92% of com-panies say they rely on the cloud. “And when it comes to why, there are different reasons our enterprises embrace the cloud. It’s about streamlining operations, agility, scal-ablity, innovation and reduced costs. In many cases, it’s building a new product. A lot of companies go to the cloud based on their individual needs.”

In the past five years, it’s primarily IT functions that have migrated to the cloud. But in the next five years, operational technology (OT) organizations will be migrating faster than IT, predicted Mohan. “A lot of our OT customers are seeing the benefits,” he said. “Cloud is what brings the IT and OT organizations together. Cloud is the uni-fying technology for IT-OT convergence. Cloud is going to make all organizations be IT-managed but OT-operated.”

Portfolio to expand over timeFactoryTalk Hub is a portfolio of cloud-based applica-tions that will span Design, Operations and Maintenance capabilities. The Design Hub, including Design Tools and Vault capabilities, is available now. Operations Hub, including Remote Access, will be available next quarter. And Maintenance Hub, based on software from recent acquisition Fiix, will be added soon. “FactoryTalk Design Hub improves design productivity and collaboration with cloud-enabled tools that give context to operations,” said Mohan. “Operations Hub makes it easy to get data and manage physical assets with cloud-enabled visualization, analytics and connectivity.”

“The FactoryTalk Hub product suite is built on Micro-soft Azure,” explained Mohan. “It connects OEMs and end users across the industrial lifecycle, with one digital thread giving context across it all. And the applications all come together as one product suite.”

“FactoryTalk Vault is live and available today,” said Mohan. “It offers secure industrial file storage for your automation needs. A lot of customers are using our design

“Cloud is the unifying technology for IT-OT convergence. Cloud is going to make all organizations be IT-managed but OT-operated.” Rockwell Automation’s Anoop Mohan introduced the company’s FactoryTalk Hub portfolio, and described the capabilities roadmap for the cloud-based application suite.

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

products. Now we have a cloud-based destination where you can design and collaborate. It’s a secure place where you can upload your design files.”

“You can also manage file type conversions,” added Mohan. “We make it easy for you to embrace our next-generation design software.”

“But we don’t stop there,” said Mohan. “We’re continu-ing to add on-demand design and emulation capabilities. What that really means is you should be able to open Studio 5000 in a completely simulated environment with no more trying to figure out what laptop configuration you need.

Pre-configured virtual machine images should be in the cloud for different use cases. In addition to Studio 5000, Logix Echo and Emulate3D will be available.”

On-demand design and emulation capabilities will be previewed at November’s Automation Fair in Houston. “We’re working on a lot of products,” Mohan concluded, “and we want to make access to them easy and simple.”

Mohan’s full ROKLive presentation, entitled “FactoryTalk Hub: Cloud Products for Next Generation Industrial World,” remains available on demand through October 2021.

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

EDGE TRANSFORMING TO PERFORM SECURELYBy Chris McNamara, Smart Industry

Like every other element of digital transformation in the industrial space, edge computing is in a con-stant state of flux. And during his “Next In Tech”

presentation at ROKLive 2021, Kris Dornan, Rockwell Automation marketing manager for machine, process and safety controllers, provided an update on shifting customer needs and the new solutions to meet them.

“The edge is transforming, including the devices, the connectivity of those devices, and where computing capa-bility needs to sit,” he explained. “We are architecting the right infrastructure using edge products for performance, reliability and security.”

Dornan detailed how today’s industrial PCs are utiliz-ing edge computing in innovative ways, relying on cloud computing or the on-premises approach, depending on the needs of manufacturers. Central to these discussions is protecting the data as it flows from its source to the visualization platform and making sure this information delivered in a manner that operators and engineers can use it to make better decisions.

Make it secure. Make it contextualized so it can be put to work.

Of course, as Dornan phrased it, the distribution of information from edge to the cloud also entails increased cyber-security risks. He listed how modern approaches entail: • Embedded cybersecurity that pro-

vides protection at the fundamental root-entry points for intruders (“exter-nal and internal intruders”), which is

particularly important as the cybersecurity attack sur-face continues to expand.

• The digitalization and emergence of affordable hard-ware focused on closing the loop between data extrac-tion and value creation.

• Enterprise systems absorbing plant-floor computing with the tighter integration of IT and operational tech-nology (OT), realizing real-time synchronized manu-facturing operations. “But the need for computing is not going away,” he clarified. “There are still problems that require this compute power.”

• Advances with networking capabilities and the Eth-ernet (both wired and wireless). Dornan labeled Eth-ernet “the workhorse network of choice throughout manufacturing and production.”

• Connected products driving customers toward low la-tency operations. “We want to work in real time, not be waiting. Scheduled maintenance is still effective, but with new system intelligence, the system can order replacements on its own.”

“We are architecting the right infrastructure using edge products for performance, reliability and security.” Rockwell Automation’s Kris Dornan discussed how the company creates edge-spanning, scalable solutions by bundling the right hardware, software and connectivity technologies.

Highlights of ROKLive 2021

Closer to “where the magic happens” The terms “scalable computing” and “edge computing” can be used interchangeably, said Dornan, addressing how Rockwell creates solutions in this space that bundle the right hardware with the right software, prioritizing the ability to scale solutions for customers, which enables the greatest gains. “We can move these solutions up from the device level to the system level, then ultimately to the enterprise level, either in a private or public cloud setup, on-premises or remotely administered.”

To exemplify such solutions, the marketing manager presented three hypothetical use cases.

Use Case 1: The customer needs a way to embed a custom application on an operating system without the need for a white-box computer that must be managed by her IT department.

Solution: Rockwell Automation’s ControlLogix com-pute module, which enables her to use computer-software programs to build a next-generation algorithm that takes advantage the newest computing languages, which the upcoming generation of engineers is using for their auto-mation strategies. “We can combine the best of these new code-building strategies with those that we have long been using.”

Use Case 2 : The customer needs a human-machine interface (HMI) that displays content from various devices and applications.

Solution: Rockwell’s VersaView industrial computer, which employs a thin client architecture capable of man-aging various anti-virus applications.

Use Case 3: The customer needs a controller that can meet high-demand motion applications while at the same time be accessed using Studio 5000 Logix Designer for maintenance purposes.

Solution: Rockwell’s CompactLogix 5480 controller, built to handle this marriage of operating systems while bundling software and hardware.

Dornan closed his ROKLive presentation with an explanation of why his team uses the Windows 10 IoT Enterprise OS Long-Term Service Branch, a specialized edition of Windows 10 Enterprise that promises the lon-gest intervals between feature upgrades of any Windows operating system (OS). He explained how Rockwell Auto-mation worked with Microsoft to identify the proper OS for its industrial-control applications. “It’s built for the hardened environment, which is critical and why it was selected,“ he said.

“All of this technology is changing, quickly, at a very high level,” Dornan summarized. “We at Rockwell Automation are staying ahead of the curve and looking at how we can take advantage of these new technologies to create unique solutions when it comes to customers’ control architecture and algorithms. Customers have problems and they are looking for insights. They rely on a vendor like Rockwell to deliver solutions that make sense.”

Dornan’s full presentation, entitled ”Transformation of the Edge: Architecting Infrastructure for Performance, Reliability and Security,” remains available on demand through October 2021.

Highlights of ROKLive 2021