Over the past several years, Rockwell Automation has ably proven the potential of The Connected Enterprise, the company’s vision for plant-floor sensor-to-enterprise level system integration, to yield outsized business benefits through improved upward visibility and downward decision-making.

In the course of its own “global process transformation,” which is built on the roll-out of the company’s FactoryTalk ProductionCentre MES solution across 20 manufacturing facilities, the company rationalized business processes and booked enviable improvements in plant performance, supply chain efficiency and customer service. Inventory, for example, dropped from 120 days to 82; on-time delivery improved from the mid-80s to 96%; and quality, as measured by defect rates, improved by 50%.

“But now we’re in phase two,” said John Genovesi, vice president and general manager of the company’s information solutions and process business in his opening remarks to the annual gathering of the Process Solutions User Groupthis week in Atlanta, during the run-up to the 25thanniversary Automation Fair. Not satisfied with the dramatic yet incremental, the company has started seeking discoveries that spring from analyzing combinations of production data and enterprise data. “Suddenly we can get after warranty problems and relate them back to manufacturing issues,” Genovesi noted. The company also has begun to relate field failure patterns to production variables and to discover new correlations through Pareto analysis.

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