Electricity and Control February 2023

INDUSTRY 4.0 + IIOT

Finding success in a post-pandemic world

Tessa Myers, SeniorVice President, intelligent devices, at Rockwell Automation here highlights three trends industry is adopting to power growth. Myers was one of the featured speakers in the ‘Perspectives’ thought-leadership session held ahead of Rockwell Automation’s Automation Fair 2022 in November 2022.

Tessa Myers, SVP intelligent devices, Rockwell Automation.

T he Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the way we live and work. Now, nearly three years on, industrial operations are facing new and different challenges as the world makes major shifts in the way people are working and expectations of consumers and stakeholders change rapidly. The challenges all of us were experiencing prior to the pandemic, particularly the lack of access to skilled workers, have only become more pronounced over the past two years. When I started working, a lot of what we focused on was lean manufacturing. It was a wonderfully simple time for manufacturers. All of us had the playbook for what it took to drive improvements in our operations, but that is not the case at present. Today the industrial sector faces not only a lack of skilled human resources for operations, but also new expectations from stakeholders who have different thoughts on what it means to be a responsible industrial company. There has been a rapid evolution in customer buying preferences. Customers want what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. It seems as if consumer preferences are moving at hyper speed. At the same time as the pandemic may have accelerated expectations, it also opened opportunities and set examples of what can be accomplished by manufacturers. We saw successes such as the rapid production of vaccines and the acceleration in construction of new facilities in response

to needs for products such as masks during the pandemic. These indicated new ways to address the industrial environment post-pandemic. We are living in a fast-changing workplace. The good news is we have never been better equipped or more ena bled to succeed than we are today with the technology we must leverage. The companies that come out on top and re alise their full potential are those focused on building agility, resilience and sustainability in their operations. We can work differently, and time gives us the opportunity to work better. As I see it, there are three trends being adopted in industry to get there – to power growth for what’s next. These trends include the transformation of production logistics to adapt quickly to changes in production needs, producing locally for rapid order fulfilment and embracing data-driven sustainability efforts. Transforming production logistics In the past, industry tended to deal with spikes in produc tion demand by ‘throwing people at the problem’. With the decline in workforce skills in the industrial sector, as in many others, that is not an option anymore. As other speakers during this session have noted, we need to reconsider how goods move through the plant to be able to handle a wide variety of product with the least amount of work. This points to the technology required. For example, Rockwell Automation has developed technologies enabling hundreds of thousands of product configurations with thousands of flavours. In short, automation technology is ready to fill the void left by the absence of a suitably skilled and qualified human workforce. Among the solutions available is independent cart technology, which is designed to change the way products move through plants. This technology has proven its capacity to boost customer efficiency and increase throughput by up to 50%. Furthermore, in many cases, the barriers to integrating robotics on the plant floor have been lifted. We also see how unified robotics allow for one control platform for motion and robotics. Historically, integrating robotics and other mechatronics into systems was quite arduous and time-consuming. It gen erally required very specialised skill sets and multiple hard ware platforms. At Rockwell Automation, we have focused

The technologies needed to support industry in adapting to new ways of working and fast-changing market demands are available.

4 Electricity + Control FEBRUARY 2023