Rockwell eyes Indian SME sector

AUTOMATION: The broad trend is towards IT-friendly factory floors.

Automation helps small and medium enterprises (SME) to manufacture products that are consistent with global norms by automating the processes on their assembly-lines, thus reducing manual intervention and hence errors.

Automation, however, is very broad in its scope. And what better person to ask than Sujeet Chand, senior vice-president, advanced technologies and chief technology officer of the $5 billion Rockwell Automation to explain the concept?

Recently in Mumbai to address Rockwell India partners and customers, we asked him how automation would help small businesses.

"The broad trend is towards IT-friendliness," he notes. This means the factory floor should have no surprises from the IT department," explains Chand.

Rockwell products have applications in various process manufacturing sectors like automotive, beverage, entertainment, fibres and textiles, food, infrastructure, logistics, material handling, mining, cement, oil and gas, packaging, print and publishing, semiconductor.

The company, which was earlier present only in the metros and cities such as Pune and Baroda, is already present in a place like Sahibabad near Delhi, and is now looking at Baddi in Himachal Pradesh where several SME manufacturing units are coming up.

Chand reasons that employees should be able to make sense of data that is extracted from the Programmable Logic Controller or PLC(used to automate processes such as control of machinery on factory assembly lines), says Chand.

In an automated environment, the data extracted from a PLC, for instance, will tell you if the raw material that goes into a boiler is nearing depletion. And if the SMB has a home-grown ERP (or off-the-shelf) solution, it can feed the data and add value to the supply chain process.

The Rockwell Automation Integrated Architecture (IA), explains Chand, was created for such information flow.

"It is a platform to utilise evolving technology. With the Integrated Architecture, our customers can go through three generations of technology, thus protecting 70-80 per cent of their investments. You cannot dismantle and assemble factories every second year," says Chand. These savings are important and can make or break small and medium enterprises.