Thursday, October 26, 2006

Automation Fair Sorry for no updates from Automation Fair, yet. They have kept me going from early until late for two days. I finally have a few minutes before my next appointment. Here are a few impressions: Tuesday was filled with presentations for editors called Manufacturing Perspectives. This was the best one I've attended. I'm sorting through all the information to get into an understandable format. A couple of things stood out. First, if there was a key word it was information. This was also a clue for the next day. Rockwell is investing heavily in technologies that will bring better information into the business system and then provide the analytics and visualization to help professionals make better decisions. The second substantial thing was from a couple of OEMs who discussed, not the distributed or micro control that you would have expected a few years ago here, but things like implementing Lean Thinking and other processes to make their businesses more competitive. First word of the day on Wednesday was process control. Rockwell has invested heavily over several years in technology and talent to build a substantial process (batch primarily) solution. With its strong presence in parts of process plants, it is now poised to grow its business into the batch process side of the plant. Second was an announcement of an alliance with OSIsoft bringing the Pi historian into an embedded space that will make it a component of the FactoryTalk architecture. The press release was short and unassuming, Kevin Roach and Pat Kennedy spoke for only about 15 minutes combined, products won't be available for sale for several months, but...this is a hugely significant technological alliance that has huge implications for Rockwell customers. I'll be exploring these in the near future as I digest all of them. Jane Gerold and I had a very good, if brief, interview with CEO Keith Nosbusch. One quick takeaway--if the last 10 years of manufacturing performance improvements were based on automation, the next 10 will be based on utilization of information. We're glad to hear that, since that's the foundation we built the editorial direction of Automation World on. Well, off to another appointment. I'll write more on the plane home tonght. 10:35:21 AM    comment []