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Event
RSTechEd highlights IT’s role in manufacturing
RSTechED in its ninth year focused on IT in manufacturing.
By Renuka Vembu
Chris Marshall, Marketing Director, South Asia Region, Rockwell Automation
Southeast Asia Pte. Ltd., addressed participants at the inaugural session
of RSTechEd |
A FactoryTalk session during the RSTechED event in Goa |
RSTechEd (Rockwell Software Technical Education) entered its
ninth year this year. Rockwell Automation organized the event in Goa, spread
over three days from Aug 4 to Aug 6. It primarily focused on IT in manufacturing.
Manufacturing Intelligence (MI), the new word, aimed at providing business context
in real time, taking information from manufacturing and business. MI claims
to be more predictive and KPI focused. While this year the company focused on
people from the manufacturing stream, next year it plans to rope in CIOs as
well, for achieving better synchronization and reach.
The event organized by Rockwell Automation, provider of industrial
automation power, control and information solutions that help manufacturers,
discussed trends in manufacturing and automation. The company employing around
19,000 people, engaged the participants with more than 50 sessions that explored
the six FactoryTalk production disciplines—Design and Configuration, Data
Management, Production Management, Asset Management, Quality and Compliance,
and Performance and Visibility. The underlying motive was to share the vision
of how IT would prove to be beneficial for the manufacturing companies.
MI is growing at the rate of 20% globally. Talking about the market, Mukund
said, “Including MES and EMI, the total market accounts for around $5 billion,
and the opportunity to be tapped is huge. The US market is mature in this regard,
Europe has started to mature and Asia is the emerging one. With events like
these, we are targeting industry officials, to understand the importance of
manufacturing infrastructure and systems. Moreover, it will help manufacturers
to achieve a competitive advantage in their businesses.” A concept like
Manufacturing 2.0 has taken root in the US while in India the awareness is slowly
emerging.
As manufacturers continue on their quest for optimal performance
in the face of a constantly shifting marketplace, informed decision-making based
on real time data required for success becomes imperative. MI is more relevant
for the current scenario where data stored in a database is already old. For
this reason, people do not get time to react and respond to data before it loses
most of its relevance. The major obstacle lies in the mindset, communication
and education.
Mukund, Manager, AP ISCC, Rockwell Automation India Pvt. Ltd., informed, “Data
comes from a real-time source or database or ERP system. MI makes information
more accessible, easy to understand and use when there is a business context
weaved around it through an integrated architecture. We are trying to provide
knowledge about how to share and use this technology with our partners supporting
different concepts like collaborative management. We are also trying to find
the technology aspect to use keeping in mind the business motive.”
Manufacturers who are planning to adopt IT in their
plants can reap of some key benefits like:
- Increases the efficiency and profitability of production operations
and allowing them to run effectively with smaller staff n Lowering overall
IT costs
- Minimizing the waste and errors that result from manual data entry
- Reducing duplicate effort in buying and maintaining equipments
- Increasing the impact that plant-level improvement programs have
on the financial results of the company
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The company is involved in developing an integrated production management
and performance suite—FactoryTalk—, which is set to lessen the existing,
distance between manufacturing and IT i.e. between the automation and information
layers of an organization.
In the era of convergence boosted by new business drivers, there is a need to
maintain discipline with regard to emerging industry and government standards
and regulations. In addition, the evolution of commercial off-the-shelf information
technologies has resulted in an increased focus on the critical value of information
technologies generated from the manufacturing environment. Rockwell Automation
and its partners are making this shift of transforming the manufacturing data
into valuable business knowledge, eventually leading to availability of real
time information, enabling better decision making and thereby leading to business
benefits.
The company is working on tracking and tracing applications to help prepare
for new regulations like TREAD and 21 CFR Part 11, designing asset tracking
and management solutions to reduce costs and increase return on investment (ROI),
or deploying manufacturing execution systems (MES) for creating the critical
links between manufacturing and the supply chain.
renuka.vembu@expressindia.com
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