One of the ironies of conferences is that I can get wireless Internet connectivity, but because my Mac PowerBook battery lasts almost 2 hours, I need to find a power outlet. The 10 (I'm estimating) available outlets in this end of the hotel's conference center are a hot commodity. Yesterday, I ran my battery down doing real work and never was able to charge up again in order to blog live.
The two days of the main ARC Forum were two of the most intense ones of my editorial career. I think I was more tired last night than after almost all of the trade shows I've covered. But then, attending three receptions from 5:30 to 7:30 last night didn't help.
Talking with a marketing vice president of a major supplier, the point came up that Tuesday's presentations were a veritable who's who of automation. Not only that, there was more energy and "buzz" than I've felt in a long time. Only observation that was somewhat negative I heard was the apparent lack of representation by discrete manufacturing. Rockwell gave a presentation with a customer, but it was more software-oriented. Otherwise, the process suppliers and their customers were quite visible.
ARC provided its sponsors a chance for press conferences-more than we could possibly attend. That in addition to many requests for one-on-one interviews. In all, I only heard about two hours of the actual forum.
In one interview, I talked with Ralf-Mchael Franke, President of Siemens AG Automation and Drives. (Note, I linked to the US site for Siemens.) Franke's presentation focused on the company's development of the virtual (digital) factory. The first product (in partnership with UGS) is a designer CAD system. The long term intent of the initiative is to be able to integrate CAD design through simulation to build not only of product but also manufacture (machine design through control programming). I've seen glimpses of this technology during the past few years. I think this is a real game-changer (if they can pull it off).
Mark Davidson, vice president of marketing, announced at a press conference, that Wonderware has achieved "Powered by SAP NetWeaver" certification status. This is just another example of the continued trend of information integration.
Procter & Gamble's Rob Aleksa from corporate engineering spoke on the OMAC Make2Pack initiative. To summarize his presentation, (just a few minutes ago) there are three main points to this: development of software methods such as equipment system breakdown structure, conceptual software structure models and standard terminology; harmonize and reapply software using standards such as ISA88, PackML and ISA95 part 3; and then lastly to drive PackML as an ISA and IEC standard. Why is this important? Horizontal and vertical integration increases efficiency and response to customer demand. The concept of make-to-pack-and-ship replaces make to stock. Structured pretested code helps with regulatory compliance and validation. Last, these standards reduce overall lifecycle cost.
I'm writing this during the question and answer session after a series of presentations on both packaging and machine tool open standard integration. There is tremendous interest, lots of questions are being asked and at least as many people in the room as I've seen in my eight previous meetings here.
11:19:38 AM 
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