Rockwell's new system links boardroom to back room

Rockwell Automation, one of the world's largest control and instrumentation suppliers, is targeting the European food and beverage sectors over the next five years with the aim of unlocking information captured by shopfloor control systems and using them in higher level management planning. Keith Nosbusch, Rockwell chairman and chief executive officer, said the plan was to increase the amount of business done with existing clients, rather than pursue new ones.

"If we can do that, we can drive growth in Europe," he said. "Our growth is not going to come from market growth, it is going to come from doing more for our existing customers."

Most IT systems were limited in their ability to link shopfloor programmable logic control systems (PLCs) with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, said Nosbusch. There was a multitude of different interfaces, and they were expensive and hard to maintain. Rockwell's "integrated architecture" allowed customers to use one control environment across the whole business or enterprise to reduce the cost, claimed Nosbusch. "It's about connecting the business systems to the process systems," he said.

Jordi Andreu, president for Rockwell Automation Europe said the company's market share in Europe was not strong enough but this was an area "where we can win"

Andreu said Rockwell could now concentrate on the whole factory, rather than just primary operations and food packaging.

Pressures to reduce the costs, together with increasing legislation in areas such as traceability, were driving demand for such capability, he added.