Rockwell Automation held its 2022 ROKLive in-person event in Orlando, FL on June 13-16, 2022. The company had in-person attendance of over 1,500 users and partners. This year’s event included 125 product and technology sessions. This was the first live ROKLive since 2019, and it was co-branded as both Rockwell Automation and Plex Systems event. Rockwell Automation’s purchase of Plex Systems was announced about a year ago. A theme of this combination Rockwell Automation and Plex Systems event was “We believe in the power of combining data, technology, and domain expertise to achieve results in manufacturing and production,” which was like the digital thread that seamlessly tied everything together.
Blake Moret, Chairman & CEO of Rockwell Automation, kicked off the event by video sharing Rockwell Automation’s innovations in its core technologies, how the company is advancing its software and information solutions with high value services, and how the company is focusing on customers’ individual manufacturing challenges with software and services, including helping its customers to become more sustainable. Blake was followed by Brian Shepherd, Rockwell Automation’s Senior Vice President, Software and Control, who came to the stage to discuss the company being a 100 percent pureplay in manufacturing and operations, focused on business outcomes that optimize production, empower the workforce, manage risk, drive sustainability, and accelerate transformation. Brian shared some of its customer’s business metrics achieved with the company’s hardware, software, solutions, and services, such as Chilean copper mining company Codelco increasing production by 80,000 tons/day; biomanufacturing company Cytiva achieving a 10 percent increase in throughput and employee efficiency; and New Zealand dairy cooperative Fonterra experiencing a 20 percent OEE improvement, improving capacity without capital expenditure for new plants.
Brian then assembled a panel to discuss the company’s Connected Enterprise Production System model. Brian covered the design category, citing the company’s Emulate3D solution, which consists of digital twin software used for virtual commissioning, throughput simulation, and industrial demonstration. Brian also covered the company’s cloud-based SaaS FactoryTalk Design Hub. Joining Brian on the panel was Bob Buttermore, Vice President and General Manager of the company’s Power Control Business, who covered the intelligent devices segment, focusing on the operate and maintain category. Bob cited intelligent data models being embedded along with AI into devices ranging from sensing, industrial control, safety, power control, and motion control.
Also joining Brian on the panel was Dan DeYoung, Global Business Director of the company’s Control and Visualization Hardware, who discussed open, connected, and scalable control and enabling the seamless flow of contextualized data from the edge to the cloud. Next, Nathan Pieri, Group Vice President, Product Strategy and Management, Plex Systems, joined the panel to discuss industry-focused on-premises operations management, including FactoryTalk InnovationSuite and ProductionCentre for applications, such as manufacturing execution, asset management and performance, quality management, supply chain integration, and plant monitoring. Nathan then shifted to cloud native-based operations management solutions that are part of the company’s FactoryTalk Operations Hub, such as Plex Systems smart SaaS manufacturing platform for MES, ERP, quality, and supply chain management; as well as cloud native-based operations management solutions that are part of the company’s FactoryTalk Maintenance Hub, such as Fiix, an AI-enabled cloud CMMS company that Rockwell Automation purchased in November 2020, which creates workflows for scheduling, organizing, and tracking of equipment maintenance.
Next to join the panel was Rachael Conrad, Vice President and General Manager of Rockwell Automation’s Services Business, who discussed the company accelerating its digital services capabilities with analytics and applied AI, closing the loop with built-in purpose apps with industry focus. Rachael also discussed the importance of offering manufacturers a robust cybersecurity offering and framework consisting of a reliable, NIST-based approach for total protection. This is especially important in a time when most of the company’s customers are rapidly accelerating their IT/OT convergence initiatives regardless of whether they are at the beginning of that journey or have made substantial progress. The session concluded with all panelists describing how all these initiatives are enabling Rockwell Automation to help take their customer’s manufacturing to a whole new level, thanks to data being at the center of it all.
Following the keynote panel were several sessions ranging from hands-on labs to case studies to product and industry solutions. 
ESG was prominently featured in sessions, such as “Trends to Follow for Sustainability and ESG in Manufacturing,” hosted by Gerry Abbey, Product Marketing Manager, Plex Systems, and Allie Schwertner, Sustainability and Technology Leader, Rockwell Automation. The session featured data that shows how ESG is growing in importance for manufacturers and how sustainability and ESG initiatives help manufacturers save money, provide purpose, and attract talent. Smart manufacturing software that feeds these ESG and sustainability initiatives includes MES, QMS, and supply chain planning (SCP).
Gerry Abbey also hosted a session on Smart Manufacturing that focused on some of the adversity faced by manufacturers today in the form of skilled worker shortages, supply chain disruption, and risk mitigation. Gerry then covered some of the tools, such as connected supply chain planning software that can help to alleviate those issues; as well as technologies, such as automation, smart devices, IIoT, AI/ML, AR and wearables that are helping because of more widespread adoption.
Hector Jimenez, Technical Consultant, Rockwell Automation hosted a session entitled “A Day in the Life of a Digital Worker: Augmented Reality (AR) Use Cases,” which focused on workforce issues, such as retirements, growing worker skill gaps, dealing with legacy systems, evolving customer demands, and the increasing complexity of today’s products and processes. Many of these issues can be addressed with AR to connect workers with critical information by super-positioning digital information directly into the 
real world, reducing the cognitive load and improving work efficiency and accuracy.
Olusola Oduntan, Product Manager, Plex Systems, hosted a session entitled “Balance Material and Plant Resources in Supply Chain Planning,” which focused on issues, such as trade wars, tariffs, the pandemic, and military conflicts that have created unprecedented supply chain uncertainty, volatility and disruption and requires a totally new approach to supply chain planning based on resiliency and agility. Plex offers an app for Constrained Capacity Production Leveling (CCPL) that is part of the company’s DemandCaster Supply Chain Planning solution, designed to help minimize the impacts of fluctuations in customers’ demand by using constrained capacity planning, inventory planning, and level-scheduling techniques to help ease operational volatility and provide operational stability. This load and production leveling and smoothing tool acts as a lean operations management technique for reducing waste caused by volume fluctuations in customer demand by planning and scheduling production at a constant volume and establishing a predictable rhythm in the schedule of products. This creates a smooth flow of production over the planning period with the overall objective of minimizing supply chain disruptions caused by sudden changes in 
demand. CCPL focuses on finished goods work centers, with tools for critical capacity requirements and an app for maintaining the master production schedule.
There was a session on taking a scalable approach to energy hosted by Frank Schirra, Global Portfolio Manager, Rockwell Automation. The session focused on the company’s customers’ aim for net zero, reducing and optimizing WAGES (water, air, gas, electricity, and steam) resources, and why energy management is one of the fastest growing production costs, driving the need for energy efficiency. Tools for Rockwell Automation’s customers to achieve these goals include leveraging a broad portfolio of power control and meter solutions, as well as its FactoryTalk Energy Management Platform, which includes real-time energy management and an energy IIoT solutions platform. This includes an IT/OT convergence platform-based energy monitoring application that provides energy and production information based on a plant asset model, designed to help its users make data-driven decisions to better optimize and reduce energy costs.
John Clemons, MES Solutions Consultant, Rockwell Automation, hosted a session entitled “Today’s MES: Embracing the Technology of Smart Manufacturing,” with a focus on how the MES of today bears little resemblance to those systems of a few years ago as they are more powerful and have more capabilities thanks to MES embracing smart manufacturing technology and supporting Industry 4.0. One of those differences is that today’s MES is highly mobile. Also, todays MES are designed to work with automation systems built with information in mind, using object-based data models that use common data across the system, reuse and library management at the automation layer, automatic discovery by the information layer, and provide a modern foundation for application development. In addition, today’s MES have a track and trace database that provides complete plant floor traceability and is the foundation for the entire MES solution. Today’s MES seamlessly links to the enterprise, supply chain, as well as to IIoT to connect smart machines in the smart factory. Benefits derived from today’s MES include measurable increases in quality, responsiveness, efficiency, and on-time deliveries while decreasing inventories and lead times.
Oliver Haya, Commercial Product Manager, Rockwell Automation, hosted a session entitled “Growing, Scaling and Managing the Industrial Edge” focused on how the industrial edge is critical to data collection, analytics, and operations management across 
devices, and is the next frontier to help simplify deployments and create consistency across the enterprise. Edge is at the intersection of IT and OT, where the digital and physical worlds converge, with computing happening near the location where data is collected and analyzed. The industrial edge is seeing fast-changing dynamics and a continued focus on simplification, efficiency, and security, driven by increased data creation and processing, increased demand for reduced latency and processing outside the cloud, and the need to push data security, quality, and lifecycle management to the edge. Users should be preparing to scale at the edge, building an edge computing strategy, maximizing their edge deployment success, actively discovering, and identifying all devices, managing deployment of apps to the edge, and reducing their attack surfaces. In response, Rockwell Automation offers an intelligent edge management solution, FactoryTalk Edge, which is an intelligent, centralized edge management infrastructure solution that is accessible with a single sign-on with other Rockwell Automation SaaS products and addresses edge computing use cases across IT and OT and the cloud, plant, and line levels. Capabilities include being able to onboard and manage edge devices, including configuring and monitoring; publish edge apps, and provide control access. FT Edge is capable of fleet management, managing edge devices as a fleet for scaling productivity, and enables users to either buy third party apps or build their own.
Rockwell Automation’s Amanda Thompson, Product Marketing Manager-Analytics; and Victoria Bruce, Product Manager-Analytics Visualization, hosted a session entitled “Achieving Continuous Improvement with Real-time Operations Visibility” focused on the impact of analytics on operations, and data and analytics impact on decision making. OT personnel often lack the tools to transform manufacturing and operational data and gain actionable, meaningful insights to improve productivity and efficiency without relying on IT and expensive data warehouse infrastructures. Three key challenges include not having skilled data scientist and architect personnel, not having the required infrastructures, and the time needed to implement and maintain a solution. To address these challenges, Rockwell Automation offers its FactoryTalk Analytics DataView solution that is designed to turn industrial data into meaningful insights for OT personnel responsible for line, plant, and enterprise-wide operations. This provides users with a “single version of the truth” for consistent information sharing, help to troubleshoot and resolve situations more quickly, and the ability to do 
ad-hoc analysis to help drive operational efficiency. It offers OT a self-service workflow to help users aggregate data from various sources, configure interactive storyboards for collaboration without programming, and explore and analyze data with drill-down capabilities.
Microsoft has been a long-time partner of Rockwell Automation, which led to a session entitled “Collaborating with Microsoft at the Edge to Map the Next Frontier of Industrial Digital Transformation,” hosted by Salma Ghafoor, Global Technical Lead- IIoT, Rockwell Automation, and Alan Blythe, Senior Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft. The session focused on how Rockwell Automation and Microsoft are working together with their respective edge to cloud capabilities, including the integration of FactoryTalk Edge gateway with Azure Internet of Things Edge, as well as Azure cloud services. Edge-as-a-Service offerings will also be enhanced with FactoryTalk Edge SaaS offering for distributed edge management and orchestration.
There is little question as to the effect and influence of Rockwell Automation’s acquisitions of the past several years have had on the strategy, offerings, and the direction of the company. Whether it be co-branding ROKLive with Plex Systems, the cloud offerings from Plex and Fiix, the in-depth solutions for supply chain management, or the strong emphasis on ESG, sustainability and operational resilience, the evolution of the company since the last ROKLive in 2019 has been tremendous. It puts Rockwell Automation in a much better position to help its customers with their digital transformation initiatives and provide choices to its customers regardless of whether they want to keep their applications on the edge, in servers on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid of all. This enables Rockwell Automation’s customers to migrate to the cloud at their own pace and comfort level. It also enables the company to rapidly increase its SaaS, services and subscription offerings and again shift its customers to those offerings at their own pace and comfort level. This positions Rockwell Automation and its customers well for the future.
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Keywords: ROKLive, Rockwell Automation, Plex Systems, Edge, Cloud, AR, AI, ML, IT, OT, SaaS, Digital Transformation, ESG, Sustainability, Energy, Supply Chain, ARC Advisory Group.
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