Hello, I'm Al Letourneau on the senior senior commercial portfolio manager for human
machine interface Hardware here Rockwell Automation. And today I'm going to be going
through a presentation that talks about how Factory our FactoryTalk Optix can help you
innovate and differentiate your HMI applications and systems throughout the
entire cell cycle, and we're going to unlock new possibilities using FactoryTalk Optix.
So here's a little introduction from me.
Again, I'm the senior commercial portfolio manager for human interface Hardware
work for Rockwell Automation for a little over 40 years as a matter of fact, so I've
seen a lot of HMI products during that time. And today we're going to talk about a
relatively new offering that we've got: the FactoryTalk Optix and OpticPanel 00:00:57.300
--> 00:01:02.600 portfolio along with our industrial PCS. So without further Ado, let's
get started.
Now. This presentation has a somewhat unconventional structure often times when you
see presentations like this its features and The features and benefits and
that actually gets a little bit tedious at times and furthermore relies on the audience
to really make that leap from what the benefit is to how that's going to map onto
the specific things that they need to do to be successful in their business. And so what
I'm going to do today is to focus on what I'm calling business imperatives
and those business imperatives again are things that you need to do to both
build on your existing success and really build on your customer relationships and
expand your Market offerings and the Euro
by ability as a business in the market. As you can see from the subhead here. This is
somewhat targeted at the OEM and system integrator Community. But I think what we're
going to talk about today gives and users a chance to be someone intentional about how
they develop those relationships as well. So here's the first set of business imperatives.
Now I once had a OEM tell me in the future machines are going to become
modified to the point where people buy them on the cheap. They run them for a year or
two, then strip them for parts and sell them for scrap.
And that kind of sent a shiver down my spine as a matter of fact because I've worked with
oems and integrators for decades and I'm hoping and I am expecting that especially by
leveraging the unique capabilities of the Optix portfolio that people can
differentiate their systems offer greater value to their customers and by
doing so really increase their competitiveness and their viability
throughout that entire project lifecycle now in a case of where you're being asked to
quote a job and asked to provide a proposal on a piece of scenery or a system
you that ends up being a significant expenditure on
your part in investment and you're going to want to have a good feeling about your
likelihood of capturing that business before you make that investment. You're also going
to want to be able to get a premium, if you can by
offering the customer differentiated capability that really benefits them and real
material ways and really helps them be successful with their customers.
You can do that by innovating on a solid base of
intellectual property that you've generated in previous jobs and use that as a
kind of a basis for an evolving offering that really offers your
customers greater capabilities or benefits as I said.
So how do you do that? Well for one thing the Optix
portfolio and FactoryTalk Optix software in particular gives you the ability to extend it
whereas you can actually build your own modules that run alongside the modules that
we develop. If there are specific things about your
customers that you do ongoing business with for example, where
maybe they have a specific type of mixer Hardware, or conveyors, or palletizers or
other sorts of Machinery that they operate as a standard throughout their enterprise,
you can develop modules that are targeted at those specific applications and
by doing so you can increase the likelihood that these are going to provide
good results to your customers that your customers have confidence in you, and that
a new modules that you might develop alongside those previous ones,
would also be trusted because you've got a record of success. How do you do that? Well
in Optix, you can basically write your own modules using C#. And there's APIs and
scripting engines that you can use to develop not only at design time, but also when you're
running the application. These C# scripts can run and actually Stamp Out
multiple copies of a palletizer, for example, or the conveyor or a mixer
and make minor changes to each one. So you don't have to do it all longhand.
By doing that, you can give your customers a very highly specialized very powerful system
and do it at a lower cost.
A lot of that revolves around the speed with which you can develop these projects and
leveraging
those modules from the previous projects. Machinery is ideally of course getting more
sophisticated all the time and that would be a case where you can offer that
differentiated value; things that your competitors might not be able to offer
might not have thought of yet, and really outsmart the competition. We give you the
ability to differentiate using that specialized IP
so you don't have to start from scratch because with FactoryTalk Optix you can weave
in
those models and previous projects and they can actually talk to one another using
standard protocols
protocols like the OPC UA protocol that makes the
time required to develop and deliver those systems lower. The risk is lower. The cost is
lower. And again using that C# scripting to generate those new objects then using those
additional scripts to stamp
out copies of those objects in real time at you as you run the application.
So also mention that the FactoryTalk Optix Studio
Standard Version is no cost so you can evaluate it by downloading it trying it out.
And
then when you go to use it you basically just by run times. So
as you develop that application you can also use that full-featured emulator to get a
better handle on how it's going to work.
So I mentioned speed a few times and in cases where you do have new scope and you got to
develop new material new content for use in these
systems that you're putting together your going to want to be able to do that as
quickly as you can and part of that really is having a teamwork approach. We have multiple
eyes on a project multiple people working on it together
now having done this kind of work myself in the past. That kind of scares me a little bit
because if you have a team of people work and you can end up with duplication of efforts
you can end up with a very communication we're
different code branches people are working on stuff. They didn't tell each other what they
were changing. They bring back to the table a version that's not rationalized against the
other versions. All of that can be eliminated by using
get Integrations with FactoryTalk Optix where you can basically do Collaboration you
can even do it in the cloud. If you use our design Hub capability,
then you could have multiple people working together on the same project at the same time
building were testing each other's work. It's got built-in revision control so you can
tell who changed what and why that then would give you the ability to
resolve those conflicts before they result in duplication of efforts and result in people
having a back out the changes that they made and then refactor them into the other
other code branches and regression test at all. It
gets to be kind of a nightmare if you don't Good
good built-in revision control and you do get that using these get Integrations with the
FactoryTalk Optix.
Now oftentimes especially with people who are coming to this
sort of a work either as a design person or is an operator.
They're going to bring their expectations from commercial products. They want these
hmis to work like their phone works or like their tablet works or whatever other sort of
appliance that they might have that uses these sorts of modern design
experiences. They're going to expect that in industrial
situations as well and
That being the case you can also as you do this modern HMI
front end. You can also in the bargain make these
systems adaptable so you can sell them globally without modifications.
The way you could do that in the Optix context did use the HTML5
compatible rendering engine that would allow you to weave in high-quality
visualisations videos for training and for
troubleshooting instructions. You can as you place the objects on the screen
you get scalable Vector graphic capability that enables pinch and zoom you can anchor
those objects at various places on the screen at the edge
at the center or whatever and that way is you move the windows around and resize them or
deploy it to a smaller. Device, all of those Graphics are automatically adaptable to this
environment wherever you choose to deploy it and in cases where you want to allow
the user to change or customized personalized that experience on their end.
Maybe they like a different color scheme better or maybe they're in a different part
of the world where they use the different standard for how they form at times and
dates. All of that can be changed on the Fly by the user if you enable those through the
factorytalk opticlaritypacked. X design time
and you can also by the way deploy those to the OptixPanel products, which I'll talk
about in just a little while.
Now there was a time when if you had a controller
and a network and an HMI type of product whether it's a computer or some kind of a
firmware base terminal all of those things were on a single Network
all those things were in a single facility the controller generated the data. I went
over the network to the HMI and the person looked at it on the edge of my
all those were in a single building generally or maybe in a campus type of environment. But
what people want now is they want to decouple the physical location of the
of the people from the When the controllers from the Network's
they want to just get the information they want wherever they wanted and they wanted on
the device of their choice. They might want it on a computer or they
might want it on a firmware based Appliance. They might want it on a tablet the on their
phone and with FactoryTalk Optix in the Optix portfolio. You
can really decouple the physical location
of the of the system from the controller from the
data from the graphics or whatever. All those things can be pretty much anywhere in the
world. So it's completely up to you how you want to go about
implementing. In deploying these HMI systems.
How do you do that? Well with Optix software you can run
the HMI on a PC or on the OptixPanel, which
I'll talk about in a moment that then displays that ux that front
end locally on the screen that's embedded in the
device. It can also serve it up to remote browsers
both at the same time. So you can basically gather the data from the
controller's into the HMI. Device, whether it's on OptixPanel or a PC
and then serve that up remotely to people that happen to be walking by or people that
happen to be at home or even in some other part of the world
in cases where you want to pull that data across the back plane from the controller at
very high speeds and you want to conserve panel space that kind of
will call it Prime real estate in the actual enclosure where the controller sets you can
use this embedded Edge compute module that can again
pull that data out of the controller over the back plane at very high speed. And then
provide it to web browser that's local to that
device or potentially elsewhere in the world and feed data up to the cloud for that
matter. It can also do a lot of edge Computing so it
can pre-process that data and increase the value and then
sailing into that data before it serves it up to other devices.
No bears mentioning and I'm kind of a long live the free market kind of guy
not everybody is going to want to use Rockwell Automation, 's line of controllers
rslogix controllers not at least not in every part of the world. There are Global
customers who have one standard in one part of the world where that particular controller
vendor is dominant and then a different standard and other parts of the world and you
want to be able as an integrator or is no vim2 serve those various locations.
And do that in a way that allows you to maintain a single operator interface
standard, even when customers have different controller preferences.
So maybe one customer wants a Rockwell Automation controller here and somebody else
and in Europe and even somebody beyond that and Asia.
Well, the Optix software has multiple native drivers
that can connect the most common Automation and that works. So regardless of what
controller using or maybe you're in a heterogeneous landscaper. You have multiple
controllers in the same building. You can connect all of those controllers using native
drivers that come with the software and once the data is inside of Optix. You can use
that OPC UA to actually communicate between different devices and different models
of software within the Optix environment. Lastly using the mqtt protocol which is a
lightweight Cloud connectivity protocol. You can feed that data up to the cloud as well.
So it's very flexible on termsecure. How you develop these architectures and how you
deploy them?
Now there may be cases where you don't need a
open platform like a PC and those cases you'd want to be able to increase your
competitiveness and increase the likelihood of capturing that business
by having a lower cost Alternatives. And what's one such alternative is the Optix
panel products OptixPanels, which I'll talk about on the
next slide. I'll touch on a little bit here give the ability to run Optix and what's
essentially a sealed firmware based Appliance.
It doesn't have the You're exposed operating system. It doesn't need
the antivirus and all the administration that you
might need in an open-ended PC that then could allow you to
deploy this in a way that doesn't involve the IT department as much
and gives you the freedom to work with the OT
people if again if that's the customers preference,
I'll also mention that with Optix. It's a very component Centric architecture. So
as you get Your system you can upgrade that system and
you can allocate what we're going to call feature tokens to different functions. So
maybe you want to do recipe management and you want
to have a driver to a to a third-party controller
and you want to use a web server. That's three of these tokens that you would allocate
to those three functions. Maybe then your customer comes to you and
says, oh well, by the way, there's this other thing I want you to connect to as well
and you have to turn on a second third party driver if that's another
Republican so you can basically buy these token packages
that go from there like t-shirt sizes extra small to small to medium
to large extra large and even unlimited and then you can allocate those tokens as you see
fit in the midst of the project. So you have a you can get a really cost effective
software implementation and you can be in charge of what
functions you choose to enable for what purposes at what point in the
in the project execution.
And as I mentioned the OptixPanel is a good alternative to an open platform. You're going
to see these at a much lower price point than you'd see an open platform like a PC,
especially if you layer in the software run times these OptixPanels do a lot of the
same things that PC does in fact, if you look at them from the front you really can't tell
the difference because the faceplate the actual display and touch screen of these
devices is the same exact component that we use on our industrial PCS. So you
may On a PC for an open platform in one part of
the implementation and then the other parts
that would be elsewhere and thinly populated areas. Like
maybe you have a machine that needs to do Vision inspection
that's on a filling line of filling a capping line. So you can see that you've got the
right levels of of fluid in the in the containers and that you're you're
regulating that effectively
and then further down the line on the conveyors you have individual little stations
where people To stand between that filling line and let's
say a case Packer. Well, you can have a computer at the filling
line and slide in a third-party module of board. If you will
into that computer that connected to a vision system for example,
and then you can mix and match with OptixPanels elsewhere in that same facility
and
that same implementation and they would look and work essentially the same way,
but the Optics panels come at a much lower price point and they're much easier to
administer than an open-ended PC. So in cases where you don't need an
open-ended PC You'll see that Optics panels present you with a really good cost-effective
alternative and don't forget that embedded Edgecomb putte
product to because that's even smaller. And in fact depending on
which version of the Optics panel you're looking at. It comes in and it even lower
price point and at that point you can just use a
other sorts of devices with a web browser to pull the data from that embedded Edge
component module and visualize what's going on within the control system.
Now in the case where you do want a industrial PC,
there's a lot of PC's out there and really the beauty of PCS is that they're somewhat
commodified meaning that yeah, you can buy a Windows PC from lots of different vendors
and now kind of work the same way as you might
expect. I mean that's the beauty of them is that
if you buy a PC from one vendor Works more or less the same way as it does from others
and you might also see that some of those come in a lower price points. You can buy PCS
on Amazon for example with plastic cases. They're inexpensive and small.
Just keep in mind that when you look at these purchase prices. They don't really tell you
the true cost of ownership. They don't really even tell you the true cost of
project implementation because if you do have a PC that gives you trouble during the
implementation that's going to cost you time that's going to
cost you potentially could cost you money. And so if you look at the real
true cost of ownership of these systems,
you really have to look at the reliability of them as well.
Now with the atom 6300 industrial PCS, which is see picture over here on the right.
Those are Rockwell product that originates from a subsidiary of ours Azam. That's based
in Italy. They've got a they got a great Market presence in Italy and increasing
Market presence here in North America and all of their PCS are designed to be extremely
robust and reliable. They've got single board designs in most cases where all the
components are soldered onto the board. They have as few connectors and cables in Only as
I possibly can and that really allows you to
increase the tolerance of shock and vibration increased tolerance of
environments where you might have a gaseous products that are circulating that
would cause those connectors and cables to
tarnish and lose contact. So
what you want to do is be extra sure that you're looking at the mean time between
failures in the mean time to repair those products. That's really what
tells you what the real cost of those products is not
just the purchase. price
And support now Rockwell has a very well developed
lifecycle Services capability matter of fact
when I started with Rockwell many years ago. That's what I did. I was a contract
programmer. I did field work field support and so on and at that time, it was a
relatively new thing for us, but what we were doing at that time was to professionalize
that so we could afford to invest in it and by increasing the value of that offering that
customers would be willing to pay for it. I'm happy to say that that's been
Ever-increasing component of our overall business and that's really been a huge help
to our customers over these few decades the support that your customers need is going
to be changing here. If it hasn't already in a case where you have for example a spare
parts business where you sell machines and then a customer has an issue with one
component on there. Yeah, they could come back to the vendor if it's Rockwell if
somebody else and buy that part from the vendor, but I think there's value in going
back to the integrator or going back to the OEM and buying that part through them because
They'll know that they're getting the right one and they'll know that the firmware revs
are going to be compatible and so on and that can be a huge help
but there's no reason to send it. So on-machine maybe have a spare parts business
more or less physically walk away from it and not manage that in conjunction with the
customer and help them maintain that machine remotely by doing so you can really help to
overcome the kind of demographic shifts. We're seeing what's sometimes called the
silver tsunami or the or the turnover that's been associated with the post pain am Akira.
There really is a way for you to offer your customers a great deal of value on an
ongoing basis. They're really cement those ongoing relationships that you have with
customers so that they look to you not just for the purchase of the initial machine, but
for ongoing support, which could be a revenue stream for you. And also of course to
capture follow-on business as well as they expand and modify their facilities. So by
connecting up to these machines which you can do we use in MQTT protocol. Call connecting
it up to your cloud or rock walls cloud or Microsoft Azure Cloud a say WS or
whatever and collecting information from these machines as they run you can log their
fault status. You can trigger predictive maintenance so that you've solve
problems before they result in downtime and you could include that potentially in the
warranty for the warranty period and then if you want offer that as an optional service
for future years and many cases customers, especially this evaluations.
You during that first year will be happy to compensate you for having that ongoing
support and like Rockwell if you professionalize that
support function, then customers will be
happy to pay you because they'll get a lot of value from it. And how do you
actually make those connections and make those changes to the program maybe load of
firmware patch, maybe load a new revision of the application of a customer wants to
change. Well one option is factorytalk remote access.
A lot of customers and users want a way to connect to their
equipment they understand the value of having remote support
but they have standards. They might have systems that they've built of their own some
of those systems might be of better quality than others. They're all going to tend to be
different and fundamentally
people who make food want to be in the business of making
food people that make electrical equipment want to do that people
make cars ditto. They don't want to be in the mode.
Of building and maintaining their own cloud infrastructure and their own remote
connectivity functions and so on. It's really not their main business nor is it really the
business of an oem or a system integrator necessarily
would it be great to have a way that worked across multiple customers
multiple vendors, it was Secure it was consistent and somebody else would take care
of it for you. So you didn't have to build it or maintain it or
regression test it or handle security Audits and so on that was
just all taken care of you just pay a small monthly fee. Fee
that's reasonable. That's flexible and you don't have to think about anymore.
Well, that's what Factory talk remote access does it basically gives you the ability to
connect up with your computer up to Rockwell's Cloud infrastructure
open up a VPN connection or virtual private network connection the remote and
mobile remote Optics panel or industrial PC.
You can then connect to that you can load patches you can load apps over that secure
connection and the case where you get the remote access
Pro license, you can actually use that device.
On the remote Network whether it's a PC or an Optics panel, you can use that as a Gateway
and go through it to connect two controllers to connect two
drives other sorts of intelligent devices managed switches. What have you
because you're basically establishing a connection through that
Remote device the PC of the Optics panel lets you get to all those connected devices on the
remote end and manage them, too.
And probably best of all you only pay for what you're using.
So you only pay for concurrent connections. If you have 10 people that might use this
you're not paying for all time. You might not pay for any of them. If
people only use this once a week or once a month you don't pay
for any of it unless it's being used. So it's nice to have that concurrent licensing
because it really can save you a lot of money and again factorytalk remote access lets you
focus on your business and leave the comms to Rock Bottom ation.
So no talk like this is complete without talking about industry 4.0 and The Internet
of Things industrial internet of things and what it means really to have a smart
machine is continuing to expand
there was a time. Like I said where you might sell a standalone machine,
it might be somewhat commodified and customer could buy that from pretty much
anyone who made that type of machine,
but I think it's really incumbent on all of us to offer greater value.
Customers and increase their productivity in such a way that
those machines then not only talk to one another but they integrate across the
Enterprise. I was when I was young.
I remember working with early Servo drives and talking about closed loop control in the
Servo Drive. Well, that was great. We close the position Loop close the velocity Loop and
so on but now you have to close the loop throughout the
entire Enterprise and you have to do that with
airtight cybersecurity. So Optics connects to our controllers, it
connects two competitors
automation protocols. As I said, it uses OPC UA to communicate
not just to other modules one. Say you might Right or ones that you might buy from from
third parties that might work with a barcode reader with the vision system work with
pneumatics or what have you that OPC UA is the way that it talks to
itself. So those subsystems can communicate with one
another using OPC UA Optics connect at the ODC odbc database
databases for things like recipe management. For example, those odbc
databases can be locally on the individual industrial PC, or they can be remote either
within the same facility or elsewhere. Within the Enterprise
and you can exchange data as I said using MQTT up to the cloud and back and use that to
provide scada information to supervisory locations in
like the elsewhere in the world or at least elsewhere in the country
and again coming back to that closed loop metaphor. We're now expecting customers are
expecting
to close the loop not just on the individual machine, but
close the loop across the Enterprise decide what we're going to make On any given
day download all the information from an NES system make the re actual production feed
that back up to the cloud using mqtt
so that you can have all your management reporting and analytics that give you a
feeling for how well your business is running
now one practical aspect of project
implementation is a we hope we're not going to have problems. But
in fact we often do maybe your customer has a last-minute scope change.
Maybe there's a misunderstanding between you
and your customer on the scope. Maybe they
decide that they're going to slow down the implementation or speed it up.
There's all kinds of unforeseen circumstances that can arise during the implementation of a
project and one thing that can really decrease the
risk associated with those changes and really take some of the heartache out of
those sort of Dynamics during project implementation as your
Closed Allen Bradley distributor Rockwell had had, and Allen-Bradley has had a
distributor Network now for coming up on 100 years and that distributor Network, which of
course originated in North America both the US and Canada has really expanded. We now
have a very strong distributor Network really pretty much throughout the world and those
Distributors can be your partners in ensuring the positive outcome of your project of
limitation. So you have people that are knowledgeable that are
resourceful that are local to you if you need part and they happen to have it on the Shelf
they can get over to get it over to you in a couple hours as opposed to getting them in a
couple of days or weeks. What you got is
our limited distribution strategy, which ensures that these Distributors are the one
and only the one and only organization in that
geographic area that offers these products. It really gives them the ability to invest
not only in their stock and then their capabilities but in
their people so they have very knowledgeable. Specialists
who work in the come to talk to your facility
every week every day and can help you work through whatever issues
might arise help you spec out the correct equipment help get it to you during the
timeline that you needed in order to move the project forward / the project schedules.
If you have an issue in a remote area, maybe to a job site. There's a distributor there
too. And that goes for whether that's in Latin America and Asia Pacific Australia for
that matter, India. Any part of Europe you could imagine turkey.
There's Distributors everywhere in the world and they're there waiting to help you. So if
you do your implementation most of the most of the work here in the states, and then you
go to do the Asheville start-up elsewhere in the world rest assured. There's a distributor
there as well. And because they've got that critical mass and because they're The One and
Only Game in Town relative to that product offering they really invest and they really
got a highly developed capability to assist you and decrease your risk as you do that
that were So in conclusion,
I think what I've done is to show you how the FactoryTalk Optix
portfolio and the azzam 6300 PCS really give you the ability to
increase your competitiveness and to really cement your relationships with your customers
throughout the Project Life Cycle. You can really
count on differentiating your capabilities. You can
become modify your Machinery. You can feel more confident that
when you bid Project you're going to get that project at
the projects going to come off without a hitch
and that as you move into the support
part of that equation that you also have a good way to derive
some recurring revenue from your customers by providing them with remote support as well.
So I urge you to visit the Rockwell Automation show floor, if
you're attending automation fair and person.
Otherwise, we have a lot of different presentations that are available to you. So
Of which are available on demand as well. Here's a partial list of the various sessions
and online Labs or Hands-On Labs that we're going to be offering during automation fair.
So for those of you that are able to attend in person
be sure and sign up for these in advance because they will fill up I will tell you
that the FactoryTalk Optix Hands-On lab is been very very popular. So make sure that if
you want to attend that that you register for it as soon as you can
and there will be a couple other on demand sessions that are available like this one
that you can view over the internet as well. Don't forget that we'd very much like to have
your feedback. So through our website and also through the app that's available for
your phone. You can give us feedback on how this
presentation went what you're what you're what value you might have derived
from it and we'll use that to iterate our strategy
and iterate our purse or presentations as we move into future events.
And with that I thank you for your time and
look forward to seeing you at Automation Fair if you're able to attend in person.