AI, connectivity, servitization to shape tomorrow’s machines
New opportunities await original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), according to the Global Machinery & Equipment Report 2024. Michael DuVall (right in photo), partner, Bain & Company, which created the report, joined Rockwell Automation’s Joe Biondo (center), global strategic marketing manager, OEM, and JP Wright (left), director, visualization business, as part of a panel discussion during Automation Fair last week in Anaheim, Calif.
“The overarching message is there’s a push for smarter, more connected equipment,” revealed DuVall. “Machine builders are thinking about maintenance service contracts and machines as a service. And there’s a big interest in artificial intelligence (AI).”
Manufacturers want machinery that is more connected; they want smart equipment, said DuVall. “Partners are looking for more ways to do more,” he explained. “The business opportunity is tremendous. You’re starting to bring bundled services, like machines as a service. It really is an inflection point. Technology is moving more quickly than in the past. You need to catch up or be left behind.”
Bundled solutions, explained DuVall, are a change to the way OEMs have been working. “The shift is from a product-led mentality to a customer-led mentality,” he said. “You’re looking at the lifecycle of the machinery. It’s a shift to where you’re focused on solving customers’ problems, and then you look for ways you can adapt that one solution for other customers. That’s a big opportunity from a margin standpoint.”
The big growth and potential to unlock profit on the digital side is with AI, DuVall added. “The big push on AI is how to scale it,” he explained. “That’s important. You have all this data on the installed base, and you can use that.”
A head start on OEMs’ needs
Rockwell Automation has looked at the Machinery & Equipment Report 2024 to see how it might align its own OEM offerings with the findings. And, in many instances, it found it already had.
“When I read the Bain Report, it aligned with what Rockwell wants to do,” explained Biondo. “The three things we’re focusing on are shortening time to market by accelerating revenue streams, leveraging data to drive continuous improvement and helping our OEM customers to understand what their machines are doing.”
FactoryTalk Optix is an example of a Rockwell Automation offering that continues to evolve since its release in March 2023. “It helps accelerate the time for software development,” explained Wright. “It structures the data to simplify the user experience.”
With its multi-user collaborative design environment, FactoryTalk Optix can be plugged into GitHub or other DevOps platforms. “We provide libraries of standard objects,” said Wright. “FactoryTalk Optix drives new value. It’s an OPC UA Industry 4.0 platform. How data points relate to one another is easily discoverable.”
FactoryTalk Optix can be deployed to operator panels, industrial PCs or virtual machines running Windows or Linux. “We’ll be launching Optix Edge in a few months,” added Wright. “Because of its extensibility and the way we’ve licensed it in packages, Optix allows you to do things that were once cost-prohibitive. There’s been a lot of innovation coming from our ecosystem.”
That ecosystem has already been responsible for the expansion of information models. “We come out of the box with standard information models, but if the customer has created its own information models, we can add those to the library,” Biondo explained. “It is bi-directional communication, depending on the customer need.”
