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Nosbusch Says MES Now In Logix Roadmap

by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Sunday, November 26, 2006 8:00:00 AM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

When you look at Keith Nosbusch, Rockwell Automation's chairman and CEO, you'll notice that his appearance hasn't changed much since he took the helm in February 2004. But when you look behind him, at the company he leads, there's a lot that's different. Rockwell is no longer just a products company. Now, Rockwell is a service-oriented automation company that builds around its customers' needs, not product features and specifications.

"We are trying to change our image," said Nosbusch in an interview at the company's annual Automation Fair in Baltimore in late October. "But the product remains important."

The product Nosbusch is referring to is Logix, the company's control system, and FactoryTalk, the brand under which Rockwell is marketing its new suite of service-oriented plant information systems.

This fall, the company began rolling out the first two pieces of that suite -- FactoryTalk Integrator, a Web-services based data management tool, and FactoryTalk Portal, a dashboard that pulls historic and real-time data into role-customizable dashboards. In October, it announced FactoryTalk ProductionCentre, an MES application that leverages the technology assimilated from its acquisition of Datasweep last year.

"We have converted the entire Datasweep portfolio to include FactoryTalk services," Nosbusch said. ProductionCentre includes operational visibility, business risk management, and quality assurance capabilities. "Now we have an MES platform that is contemporary and fits into the roadmap of Logix."

The Logix roadmap has a lot of ground to cover, as Rockwell looks at all the ways Web technology can serve up more information from the controller to the enterprise. One of the first stops on that path includes a joint development agreement with OSIsoft Inc., which was also announced at Automation Fair.

The two companies will embed the OSIsoft PI System, a data collection engine, into Logix and FactoryTalk applications, beginning with the FactoryTalk Historian, which will roll out next spring. The value of embedding PI in Logix is the ability to capture data at the device level and transfer it into an application for tracking and tracing.

"The opportunity is... to tighten the integration between control and the information architecture," Nosbusch said.

The other opportunity is in the implementation. To that end, Rockwell set up the FactoryTalk Information Solution Provider Program. It goes beyond the company's existing product-oriented Encompass partnerships by engaging global IT organizations that will strengthen the resources available for deploying integrated plant-floor and enterprise systems at customer sites. Only a handful of strategic partners will be accepted into the program, with IBM's global business services being the first.

Aligning itself with IBM is not about the sell, or getting in to see the CIO, Nosbusch said. "It's more about credibility at the enterprise level." IBM is a recognizable leader in enterprise infrastructure. That kind of team effort, Nosbusch says, will be "a great way to grow our business."

Looking ahead, Nosbusch says he will measure company success in 2007 partly by broadening Rockwell's reach into Asia and Europe, but mostly by sharpening internal business processes and fine-tuning strategic investments. Rockwell may be 103 years old, but it's got a fresh new outlook.

This article originally appeared in the December 2006 issue of Managing Automation.