Rockwell Automation: 'Every industry is under stress to constantly innovate'

Rockwell Automation has been advancing partnerships with industry players such as Nvidia and Nokia to strengthen the possibilities of building networks on the factory floor that can enable advanced automation projects.

Part of this process concentrates on Rockwell's Lifecycle Services unit. This division designs manufacturing facility projects and implements them together with clients in the production operations, looking at different lifecycle stages.

BNamericas talks to Matt Fordenwalt, senior VP of Lifecycle Services, and Alejandro Capparelli, VP and general manager of Lifecycle Services, about innovation, AI, digital twins and competition in Latin America.

BNamericas: You closed partnerships with Nvidia for AI and with Nokia for private 5G. How are they coming along?

Fordenwalt: I would not say it's commercially available right now because it's more of finding the right customer who needs that type of processing power. 

But it is about… How do you simulate automation across the entire auto facility for an EV? In a mine, how would you simulate the entire buildout of your entire mine processing? It may be overkill in certain instances, but in [others] where the computations are so intense… that's why we're exploring with them.

And then with 5G, private 5G, there's just a clear value proposition of how do you remove all the cables and the fiber to give you a lot more flexibility within your plant. 

We're testing a lot of what I call real-time deterministic traffic to see if you can run those types of applications with this private 5G. And for many customers, it's always in a precision packaging application with multiple degrees of motion. It's extremely high speed.

BNamericas: What are the perspectives?

Fordenwalt: We're very optimistic about both because we think that 5G will be disruptive over a period of time. And with Nvidia and their processing power, if not all the world's datacenters take it, we do see applications for that within the manufacturing arena.

We're jointly exploring these use cases. But tomorrow, am I going to sell? Yes, we could. But both examples are pretty expensive investments for our company to make. So we're proving those things out.

Capparelli: And just in addition to that, this is not the first experience that we're doing in order to partner with some kind of leading company in some specific technology. We did it in the past with Cisco and also with Andersen & Hauser, among others.

BNamericas: Several companies are announcing partnerships with Nvidia that also entail GPU shipments. Does this partnership include securing GPU supply for joint projects between Rockwell and Nvidia? 

Fordenwalt: I would say the partnership as it is today, we don't have high demand for GPUs. The demand curve for GPU today is obviously the datacenter. But they are exploring all markets that are potentially use cases for them, with industrial automation and manufacturing being a primary target for the use of GPUs in the future.

Capparelli: We remain at the core of the industrial manufacturing process. This is our space. We don't want to become a datacenter. We don't want to become a communication company or anything like that. Our thought process is in the four walls of the manufacturing process. 

Both partnerships, Nokia and Nvidia, add to that core business of having industrial manufacturing, autonomous industrial manufacturing with robots, more powerful, enhanced and capable.

BNamericas: What type of company is working on advanced autonomous industrial processes in Latin America? 

Capparelli: We can divide maybe the market into three segments. One is basically global accounts. That really means typically they do the development or the assessment or evaluate the technology at the corporate level. 

And after that, they deploy to multiple places. I would say maybe those are the most advanced in terms of technology adoption. 

The second segment is the locals, you know, innovators. And certainly, you can identify multiple companies that lead in terms of the technology for some specific areas. 

And after that comes the rest of the companies. There are thought leaders across Latin America that you can identify in the different industries.

Fordenwalt: We work with, as Alejandro was saying, some of those leading global Fortune 500 companies. The local innovators, the strategic sort of people who are trying to think of how to do something different. 

Every industry is under stress to constantly innovate. And with some of the technologies that have been emerging over the last decade, it's transforming how work is done. The processing power… it's hard to comprehend just how fast things are changing.

We're working [in sectors] from food and beverage to life science to mining, energy, consumer packaged goods, auto, tires. Auto, tires, is basically dominated by global companies. Food and beverage is going to be kind of a mix. We go to mining, you can find much more local accounts. We're talking about oil and gas, for example, another local account.

BNamericas: What would be third one?

Fordenwalt: I think the third one is culture. This IT-OT convergence that's happening to digitize the world adds pressure on companies.

What we're trying to do is help industries. How you blend that together better, which gets at the people and the technology. 

To be successful, you're going to have to address the talent. You’ll have to figure out how you're going to address this technology. And then, culturally, how you blend those two things together to make it happen.

BNamericas: How about the main challenges from a regional perspective?

Fordenwalt: I think there's a talent/workforce one. Challenge because technologies are evolving so fast. In cyber alone, there's a shortage in Latin America of like 500,000 security professionals.

And we know in automation that we're going to be faced with a lot of retirements and lack of replacements for those engineers and automation engineers. 

Another one is related to technology, which is what we see across the majority of industries, especially if you've been around for a long time. How do you marry that legacy technology with emerging new technologies? Most companies don't understand how to pragmatically do that, there's a lot of proof of concepts.

We typically step into that to help them develop a roadmap. How do you actually, pragmatically, get the most out of the investment you’ve made over the decades, and how do you modernize that using new technologies? 

BNamericas: You mentioned IT and OT convergence, which involves security challenges. How critical is it? If everything is online, you have a lot of doors open. 

Fordenwalt: Cyber is a cost of doing business. The risks multiply if you don't do anything. You have to do something, but you also have to pragmatically determine for your industry what is the posture you want to take, how proactive or reactive you want to be.

We're not going to dictate that to a customer, but we're going to help them on that journey to get to their maturity level that they're most comfortable with, through these pragmatic moves. 

Capparelli: When we're talking about cyber, the attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated. And when companies start propagating this kind of mix of devices that have been in the field for so long, plus the new devices, typically those created about IoT, that generates much more doors to really increase the risk.

When we're thinking about all those ways to support our customers, this starts becoming a moving target. So, really, this is something that we need to do with a high level of speed. And going back to Matt's comment, cyber is cost of doing business, related also to risk management. 

BNamericas: How are you deploying genAI?

Fordenwalt: GenAI transforms work so that you can have your best engineers. About 80% of what they're doing is manual, sort of repeatable. You want them to spend 80% of that on what's going to make your company special and different. 

So with this type of technology embedded in our next-generation software tools, we're going to unleash the power of that engineer to work on how to specialize the company. 

Now, in full lifecycle you spin that forward. So that program has been developed, now… it's in the cloud. We can analyze that, we can optimize it based on actual performance, and close loop tune it to make that performance of that machine or that line even better.

The entire lifecycle – design, operations, maintenance – gets truly transformed. 

Capparelli: AI is bringing about computer capacity, being able to build a digital twin. To design, operate, and maintain, really running the whole operation, the digital twin. This is a huge advantage that we're bringing to the industry. 

BNamericas: How do you see the increased competition with new players, often from Asia, and geopolitics? And how will you prevail in a region like Latin America, where cost effectiveness is so important? 

Fordenwalt: Well, I think in the history of business, there's always new companies that are going to come up that are going to try to figure out how to do something better, faster, cheaper. I think that we've gone through a period of globalization, and now we're sort of backing away from globalization. And that's more of a geopolitical statement. 

We're a global company serving all different markets with a strong installed base, a vision for the future. We've always been, I think, at the forefront of technology evolution and where it's going. 

You may have fast followers out there that will try to do things that have been done in the past a different way, or cheaper. What we're going to continue to focus on is where we're going, where industry needs us to go, which will, I think, be transformative for customers in terms of how they produce products in the future.

Geopolitics will dictate different markets and realms, that we can compete in or can't compete in. But at this juncture, I don't look at it.

We have all kinds of different competitors. We have our traditional automation competitors. You've got emerging niche competitors. You could say even some of our partners at times are competitors. 

So it's a very complex landscape. But other competitors are struggling more than we do in this increased Asian competitive scenario.