February 2013
By Bill Lydon, Editor
At the 2012 Rockwell Automation Fair held on November 7-8, 2012 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, I had the opportunity to talk with Blake Moret, Senior Vice President at Rockwell Automation. Moret has more than 25 years of experience in sales, systems, service, and product groups across Rockwell Automation. This experience includes international assignments in Europe and Canada.
Moret is responsible for the Power Control Business, Solutions Business (internal systems integration), Services business, and Industrial Components. Industrial Components include Electrotechnical devices such as push buttons, pilot lights, tower lights, etc.
Moret reiterated a common theme at Automation Fair that Rockwell’s number one growth initiative is process control. He noted that process industry customers, particularly oil & gas and power generation, require engineered system integration from their automation suppliers. This demand is good for his systems integration business which is growing at a healthy rate.
Networks
The products from Moret’s business unit natively support the Logix architecture with the goal of all new products having dual port Ethernet supporting EtherNet/IP device level ring architecture. Older products will use external gateways so they can be used in this architecture. Integrated Architecture is Rockwell Automation’s first development priority. The second priority is supporting competitive networks including PROFINET using external gateways. New products are converging on the use of EtherNet/IP.
In the future there will be a subnet for lower level devices such as push buttons, pilot lights, and tower lights. When I asked what this network will be, Moret described it as a simple multi-drop network without further details at that time.
Energy
Rockwell’s PowerFlex 755 drive product has the ability to sense energy consumption today supporting the ODVA CIP energy standard object. The ODVA standard allows systems to monitor energy usage. The energy control logic will come later. Drives and soft start controllers will be some of the key products to incorporate energy sensing. Products will be introduced over the next 5 years with these capabilities.
Embedded Controllers
I asked Moret about the industry trend to embed PLCs into drives. Moret noted that the Rockwell Automation PowerFlex 700S Drives with the DriveLogix option incorporated a Logix engine some time ago. He described the company’s present philosophy now is to provide control functionality in the traditional form factor of the Logix and CompactLogix platform rather than embedding control within drives and other end devices.
Regenerative Energy
I asked Moret about the trend to run smaller machines that incorporate multiple drives holistically to share regenerative energy that is resulting in significant energy savings. Rockwell Automation currently has some new things in research and development in this area.
Services Business
The services business continues to grow with service contracts including phone support, repair, block purchases of field service hours, and fixed price programs. Increasingly they are entering into fixed price service level agreements which entail being onsite a certain amount of time to fix problems using the most appropriate resources. Moret noted the interest in service level agreement contracts is growing rapidly including machine builders using Rockwell’s Virtual Support Engineer using remote services.
Rockwell’s Virtual Support Engineer uses the Allen-Bradley 200R industrial non-display computer at the machine to monitor and detect maintenance issues. The units use outbound-only communication that notifies service personnel of machine issues electronically including via email and text messages. Rockwell has a command center in Ohio that is the nerve center for virtual support personnel to help users solve problems.
Thoughts & Observations
It is unclear what the new low level multi-drop network subnet for lower level devices such as push buttons, pilot lights, and tower lights will be. I asked if it is ODVA standard DeviceNet, or CompoNet and it is not. There is certainly a need for a simple multi-drop network for panel devices to save wiring labor.
The services and integration business of most automation vendors is growing rapidly and there are a group of customers that demand this from their vendors.
Rockwell’s Virtual Support Engineer is another example of the use of technology to leverage limited technical people for service.
