It has been a year since Sudipta Bhattacharya stepped into the role of president at Wonderware, a business unit of Invensys plc. He has had big shoes to fill as the successor to Mike Bradley, who was known in the industry as the man who successfully repositioned Wonderware from a pure HMI player to a company with a full suite of operations management software.
But Bhattacharya is already well on his way toward building his own legacy at the company. Using the foundation created by Bradley, Bhattacharya is adding technology and partnerships that will bring power to the people on the plant floor.
"The gap today in the industry is that we don't empower the production worker," Bhattacharya told Managing Automation in his first media interview since his appointment as president last November. "We need to enable the first-line operator to take action. Give a person the tools to make the right decision and you can drive the next step-change in efficiency."
It was in pursuit of that goal that Bhattacharya persuaded Invensys executives to acquire SAT Corp., a maker of mobile workforce systems that is now a part of Wonderware. Indeed, the SAT acquisition in August was a bit of a coming-out party for Bhattacharya, who admitted that he wanted to show something tangible to the market that would reveal the direction in which he planned to take the company.