Rockwell Automation uses data in faster, more innovative ways, cuts costs by 90 percent
Sanjay Ravi, Managing Director, Worldwide Discrete Manufacturing, Enterprise and Partner Group, Microsoft
Industrial manufacturers are certainly recognizing the urgency to do more with their data. In a recent global study from GE and Accenture across eight industrial sectors, 66 percent of surveyed executives believe they could lose their market position in the next one to three years if they do not adopt big data, and 88 percent reported that big data analytics is a top priority for their business.
I wanted to share an incredible example of how Rockwell Automation, the world’s largest industrial automation firm, has taken major steps forward to manage and analyze its vast volume of data in a better, faster and cheaper way.
As it worked to grow its business—raising profits by about 240 percent in four years—Rockwell Automation outgrew its internal datacenters. While more customers is, of course, a good thing, imagine the volume of data to monitor, analyze and support when just one of its customers can have thousands of sensors and programmable logic controllers measuring things like temperature, pressure and vibration—each delivering up to tens of thousands of data points PER SECOND! Rockwell Automation needed a big data solution to handle the volume. It also needed to manage data in faster and more innovative ways for its customers—monitoring complex supply chains and helping them improve efficiencies, drive better performance, and enable new opportunities.
Rockwell Automation devised a comprehensive data strategy based on Microsoft Azure technologies to help it manage and analyze massive amounts of data; advance its data insights into the realm of predictive analytics; manage the complex interactions of data across multiple systems; manage large data workloads; and put actionable analysis in the hands of field workers—both its own support technicians and its customers.
Through recent proofs of concept, Rockwell Automation has learned how to be more efficient, using data analysis to boost energy efficiency. It solved the challenge of integrating complex data systems, enabling it to set up highly available and reliable data pipelines. And it did all this and more in only two weeks, cutting development time by 80 percent!
By gaining full visibility across its data pipelines, Rockwell believes the continued savings from reduced maintenance and support could be as high as 90 percent. And because they are able to orchestrate data more effectively across increasingly complex environments, they can serve remote customers at a level of efficiency that wasn’t possible before.
It’s truly an exciting example of what an organization can do when empowered with data and how manufacturers can realize a competitive edge. I encourage you to read the full case study here.
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LinkedIn: Sanjay Ravi
Twitter: @sanrav
