The past few years have been challenging, to say the least, for manufacturing companies. The globalisation of supply chains has left them vulnerable to disruption from the global pandemic and geo-political strife. The uneasy relationship between the United States and China will remain in flux for many years, further complicating the supply chain landscape.

This disorder in the global supply chain means that OEMs are operating under ongoing pressures that have expanded to a transformation point along this leg of the innovation journey. Machine builders have found themselves caught in the middle, looking to technology partners for the tools they need to give factory end users what they want when they want it. Two valuable tools available to OEMs to enhance the design process were discussed during the keynote presentation of the OEM Leader to Leader Summit during Rockwell’s Automation Fair 2023 in Boston.

“The big challenge to the supply chain has been disruption,” explains Paolo Butti, vice president of global industry, OEM, and emerging industries at Rockwell Automation. “We need to keep building resilience and strength. We know the supply chain has been forcing you to accelerate machine redesign. We see a strong demand for new machines and retrofits in the market, but not everyone goes at the same speed. In the service area, there’s a different demand from the end user. We’ve entered a transformation point, accelerating the innovation path.”

Buti points to driving faster innovation and embracing new technology standards, meeting end-user performance demands, staying ahead of workforce challenges, and elevating competency as some of the customers’ highest-priority business imperatives. These involve reskilling and upskilling existing employees, onboarding new employees to make them productive as quickly as possible, and addressing cyber needs and threats.

That creates the challenge of converting the market outlook into how you drive achievement. “We want to drive innovation with rapid adoption and continuous deployment,” Butti explains.” The concept phase is when you design your machine. How do you do that?” Technology fit, application purpose, performance, and value prediction all must be considered.

“The design phase is where everything that was ideated in the concept phase is proven,” continues Butti. “Everything—proof of target, verification and acceptance, knowledge transfer and futureproofing— is moving more into the digital world. Futureproofing is the new paradigm of flexibility. We call it machine adaptation.”

Another challenge facing OEMs is moving from a machine-based focus to a service-based focus. For years, OEMs have struggled to combat the prevailing perception of customers who viewed their offerings as mere commodities. Value was based on a machine’s ability to meet specifications. While quality and aftermarket service capabilities were essential considerations, equipment evaluation was heavily weighted on the purchase price.

Evolving digital technologies and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) have changed how end users view machine purchase decisions. Increasingly, companies are turning to their OEMs for support in meeting digitalization objectives and maximizing the effectiveness of their investments. “The service component is essential,” Butti stresses. “There’s a continuous demand for optimization and throughput, enhanced capabilities, new compliances and value adaptation.”

The next generation of innovation is being adopted, and disruption and experience capture are part of the business model. “During the machine lifecycle, there’s a process of capturing experience,” explains Butti, who cited the importance of the machine builder, technology partner, and end-user working together, referring to it as a magic triangle. “How do we capitalize on the learning and make sure the machine gets improved?”

Modern design and data-ready equipment are two critical steps toward that end, and Rockwell Automation is focused on enabling both.

Collaborative design

“Active design has become a much more collaborative experience,” explains Dan DeYoung, vice president of product management, software, and control at Rockwell Automation. “It’s turned into a variety of people working in collaboration. We aim to do this from anywhere and anytime with the lightest-weight tool—a web browser. We want to build, test, and commission hardware virtually, ensuring first-time-right quality.”

He adds that remotely deploying updates and troubleshooting problems saves time and money. “We want to enable and scale the workforce, leveraging our portfolio,” explained DeYoung.

By making four of FactoryTalk Twin Studio design tools – Arena, Studio 5000 Logix Designer, FactoryTalk Logix Echo, and Emulate 3D – available in a cloud environment, the tools are accessible from a web browser, making designs scalable across teams in multiple locations. FactoryTalk Twin Studio enables you to move quickly from software to software, accelerating the movement of the project through the design process. As your project grows, built-in change tracking and versioning automatically keep track of who did what and when so you can focus on your work, not on which file to be working on.

Upgrades and changes can be validated, and commissioning is done virtually. Plus, development expenses can be scaled to actual usage. “It’s taking our existing software tools and making them available to leverage in the modern environment.”

DeYoung says that FactoryTalk Design Studio’s modern, multi-user environment is also multi-controller. “Collaboration tools support scalable teams,” he explained, “but it was also intentionally designed to allow multiple controllers in a single project,” he adds.

A new capability, part of a collaboration with Microsoft, includes a plug-in to FactoryTalk® Design Studio™ that can use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to write code. “You still need to validate it,” cautions DeYoung, “but it’s changing the conversation.”

Visualizing data flows

In addition to FactoryTalk’s design upgrades, FactoryTalk Hub is generating the next wave of data-ready equipment, which can empower workforces with an open and interoperable architecture. FactoryTalk Hub is the team’s single online destination to access the cloud-based tools. A modern dashboard where OEMs can manage software-as-a-service subscriptions, facilitate collaboration across teams, and access the single source of truth for operations.

FactoryTalk Edge Manager and FactoryTalk DataMosaix data platform can optimise the data flow and associated costs based on customers’ IT choices. FactoryTalk Optix is one of the five core solutions in FactoryTalk Design Hub. Industrial organisations can now transform their automation design capabilities with a more simplified, productive way to work powered by the cloud. Teams of all sizes, skills, and locations can work smarter through enhanced collaboration, improved lifecycle management, and on-demand access to cloud-based software while adhering to the latest security standards and information technology (IT) best practices. The result is increased design productivity, faster time to market, and systems that cost less to build and maintain.

FactoryTalk DataMosaix enables controlled access to relevant and contextualised data. It is an Industrial DataOps solution that provides flexible and scalable tools to accelerate data usability by domain experts and analysts. It is cloud-based for multi-site, enterprise-wide access for people and applications.

“These solutions enable new business models through service offerings, leveraging architecture and structured data, which can be turned on later,” DeYoung adds. “FactoryTalk Optix is a platform that came to us through acquiring ASEM. It leverages the hardware that ASEM had been building, bringing data visualisation into our portfolio. Optix can be on-prem or in a cloud environment. It’s dynamically synchronised, and it’s scalable. We can deploy it on a panel, on a PC, on a server, or in the cloud. It’s a hyperflexible environment. At the heart is OPC UA so that it can work with virtually every manufacturer in the market.”

Meanwhile, FactoryTalk DataMosaix was born out of the oil and gas industry. “It has an inherent machine-learning capability,” explained DeYoung. “The visualisation tools it offers can analyse disparate data. Its scalability is excellent, as well.” FactoryTalk DataMosaix’s ability to collect data on hundreds of machines in a manufacturing site makes it scalable and can deploy applications for various industries, said DeYoung.

If you would like to find out more information about solutions for OEMs and machine builders please visit: https://www.rockwellautomation.com/en-gb/capabilities/oem-machine-builders.html