SPS Next Day
Still not a lot of visitors, although I was told that Siemens brought in more than 60 customers for the conference portion of the event. Unfortuneately I had no time to sit in on the conference sessions. Although the conference presenters were drawn from the supplier community, Dan Jones (the conference organizer) tried to assure solid technical content with no sales and marketing fluff.
The only press conference of the exhibition was hosted by B&R Automation. This is a company that is almost a closely guarded secret in North America. It's had a presence for many years, but has had a problem with management continuity. Recently Marc Ostertag assumed leadership, and his new team looks to be focused and dedicated. They'd better be. The press conference essentially provided a company overview for editors ($210 million in revenues, 1,100 employees, focused on machinery OEMs) and revealed company expectations for growth. Marc is charged with growing revenues in North America by 40 percent per year for the next five years. No small challenges accepted for those Austrians!
B&R is an automation supplier with the requisite offering of controllers, I/O and motion control with the software to tie it all together. I expect it to be a competitive force in the OEM market. And, by the way, Jim Pinto should be proud. During his Tuesday keynote, he challenged companies to not settle for small incremental growth, but to look for high growth opportunities. Here's a company accepting the challenge.
The coolest new product I saw at the show, and the most passionate person about his products, was a servo controlled spot welding product that fits on a robot arm. Designed primarily for the auto body assembly process, adding control to what was a pneumatic clamping process yields a ton of benefits including control of the arc, diagnostic feedback and less noise for the operators to contend with. There will be more about this use of automation in a future Automation World.
7:43:29 AM 
|
|
