Changes For Automation Trade Shows

We have two movements on the automation trade show front that are interesting. IMTS, the International Manufacturing Technology Show and formerly the International Machine Tool Show, is a huge event held in September every other year. Some time ago, organizers added an automation segment partnering with the company behind Hannover Messe.

This automation show was given a few aisles in the East Hall. The first year is was only a couple of aisles, but even this year there were not that many exhibitors. They were mostly German automation suppliers. 

The Hannover Messe group pulled out of IMTS  after the last event. It has announced the formation of a new annual show that will be held in Indianapolis in October. IMTS, meanwhile, has filled the open automation slot with a joint venture of AMT and Mesago Messe Frankfurt.

The new Hannover Messe event.

Industrial Transformation USA in 2023. The organizers of Hannover Messe USA have announced the event will be rebranded as Industrial Transformation USA and held annually, beginning in October, 2023 at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis. 

“Our exhibiting companies have been telling us they want to get in front of their customers more frequently (annually) for a number of years,” said Ed Nichols, CEO of Industrial Transformation USA.  “Our focus groups at HANNOVER MESSE USA 2022 demonstrate that our attendees, primarily OT, also want to meet more frequently and bring more members of their team.”

Industrial Transformation USA joins the Industrial Transformation brands currently serving Mexico and Asia-Pacific. Industrial Transformation USA will be built from the Operational Technology (OT) user perspective, engaging a Board of industry professionals that will guide the development of the events format and content.​​​​

Filling the opening at IMTS are AMT and Mesago, Messe Frankfurt

Two of the global manufacturing industry’s premier organizations, AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology and Mesago, a subsidiary of Messe Frankfurt Group, announced a collaboration to create the Automation Sector at IMTS – The International Manufacturing Technology Show in 2024, and SPS – Smart Production Solutions in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2025.

The Automation Sector at IMTS and SPS – Smart Production Solutions in Atlanta will be held in alternate years, and both events will be supported by Gardner Business Media (GBM), the leading publisher for manufacturing in North America.

IMTS 2024 runs Sept. 9-14 at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois.

SPS – Smart Production Solutions will be held Sept. 23-25, 2025, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The inaugural event will host exhibits from simple sensors to intelligent solutions, from what is feasible today to the vision of a fully digitalized industrial world.

The Atlanta event is an expansion of the SPS – Smart Production Solutions trade show held annually in Nuremberg, Germany. It is Europe’s leading trade fair for digital industrial solutions. SPS 2022 attracted 44,000 visitors and featured about 1.2 million square feet of gross exhibition space and 1,000 exhibitors involved in advanced automation solutions.

Mesago Messe Frankfurt also produces SPS fairs in China, Italy, and the Middle East, as well as events focusing on electronic assemblies, intelligent motion, and additive manufacturing.

The top 10 IT/OT convergence trends showcased at SPS fair 2022

Knud Lasse Lueth, founder and leader of the firm IOT Analytics in Germany, wrote a comprehensive report on trends picked up at the SPS fair in Nuremberg in November. Note: I have an affiliation with the analyst firm as an advisor. I recommend visiting the web site to check out the full report.

Smart Production Solutions (or SPS), one of the leading industrial automation fairs, was back in action earlier this month. The event that took place from 8 November –10 November 2022 in Nürnberg, Germany, showcased once again the latest industrial automation developments. Despite a smaller crowd (44,000 visitors—roughly 30% less than pre-pandemic), the fairgrounds were buzzing and filled with senior executives from many leading industrial automation companies, software providers, and related companies. The conference remains a key show for industrial automation hardware and (increasingly) software. It is perhaps the most important fair for some European (especially German) industrial automation companies, such as Siemens, Beckhoff, or Phoenix Contact.

IoT Analytics had a team of three analysts on the ground. They visited approximately 75 booths and conducted over 50 individual interviews to get a handle on the latest industrial automation trends with a special focus on IT/OT convergence. 

The main reason we are seeing interest and movement toward the convergence of IT and OT in the manufacturing space is because of IT technologies’ promise to significantly improve manufacturing. The market dynamics of an increasingly competitive world have “forced” OT, a traditionally less hi-tech sector, to consider these IT technologies. As a first step, IT/OT convergence can happen by creating the necessary (secure) interfaces between IT and OT systems.

10 IT/OT convergence trends visible at SPS 2022

1. IT-based containerization technology at the edge

2. Integration of IT and OT tools

3. Cloud-native (IT) tools for improved manufacturing operations

4. IT programming tools and languages for controllers

5. Virtual PLCs—containerized controllers

6. Digital twins to virtualize physical assets

7. Low-code tools

8. MQTT protocol connecting OT and IT

9. IT cybersecurity models for OT

10. IT approach for industrial software quality control

On another note: The team would like to give a shoutout to Schneider Electric for being one of the few companies at the fair that embraced sustainability by leading with a carbon-neutral booth completely made from recyclable materials (such as walls made of reusable wooden pallets).

AVEVA World Announcements

I had committed to a couple of events when the invitation to attend the AVEVA conference in San Francisco in November came my way. Many of my colleagues went out there thinking they had better opportunities to sell advertising than the alternative. Subsequently I received two announcements from the event. Both relate to data.

  • Constellation Energy chooses AVEVA solution to enable easier, faster, cheaper data analytics
  • Vision for connected industrial ecosystems revealed at AVEVA World in San Francisco

Weird thing to me is how marketing over the past few years regards data as something new. Way back in 1976 while working for a manufacturing company, I was moved from a position in operations to one in product development with the principle role as sort of “data czar.” I learned as far back as then about how crucial it was to have verified data in a form usable by all areas of the corporation. I was sort of at the nerve center for a few years.

We just have technologies for compiling, storing, verifying, and visualizing data that I couldn’t even dream about back then.

Constellation Energy for data analytics

AVEVA announced a partnership with Constellation Energy, provider of carbon-free energy, to give third-party analytic vendors secure access to select real-time data from Constellation’s operations.

Constellation will implement the latest release of AVEVA Data Hub, a cloud-based data management SaaS solution, which will help the company accelerate collaboration with trusted analytic partners and implement learnings more quickly, increasing the return on its analysis projects.

Currently, industrial operators, who are focused on data-driven solutions and decision-making, use a variety of methods to make real-time data available to internal and external teams. These methods are time-consuming to develop, maintain, coordinate, and some of them introduce security vulnerabilities that increase business risk. With IT staff in short supply, companies find themselves unable to respond quickly to new data requests or test out new solutions.

Constellation (formerly Exelon Energy), a long-time user of AVEVA PI System, decided to expand their data management solution into the cloud to easily share wind turbine data with a third-party analytics vendor. The company uses AVEVA PI System to collect, enrich, store, and manage sensor and time-series operations data in real-time. It then transfers that data natively to AVEVA Data Hub, a SaaS solution, where they can set up and manage select data sharing with authorized users, applications, and analytic tools both inside and outside the company. The new cloud-based addition to their data management solution is ready to use immediately; users can begin analyzing and processing data to achieve deeper insight in hours, rather than days or weeks.

Vision for connected industrial ecosystems

AVEVA showcases how industrial organizations are using real-time data to connect teams, empower them with data-led insights that speed up decision-making and unlock business value.

“We are witnessing the birth of an industrial universe that is completely connected, enabling a new kind of collaboration across colleagues, suppliers, partners, and customers,” said Peter Herweck, CEO at AVEVA.“Taking a data-centric approach empowers teams by connecting different players across the entire industrial ecosystem. This in turn transforms value chains into agile, profitable, sustainable networks. It is what we at AVEVA mean by the new, connected industrial economy.”

A recent survey, commissioned by AVEVA, of 650 senior international business executives across the chemicals, manufacturing, and power industries in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, found that 87% said they plan to increase their organization’s investment in industrial digital solutions over the next 12months.

Herweck added: “When you bring your data together and apply analytics so that you can visualize it in context, you unlock new ways of working. We are seeing leading companies like Shell and Worley breaking down data silos, building digital twins to deepen collaboration, drive transparency, and deliver actionable insights that enable their teams to work in a smarter and more connected way.”

AVEVA World has shown how leading companies such as Kellogg, Barry Callebaut, Pfizer, Dominion Energy, and Henn, starting to put in place the building blocks of these connected industrial ecosystems.  As the adoption of cloud-based industrial software becomes more widespread, organizations will be able to engage experts within and beyond their enterprise to deliver on innovative capital projects, optimize the operations lifecycle, accelerate decision-making, and reach sustainability targets that drive responsible use of the world’s resources.

Honeywell Connect 2022 Updates

Honeywell has been an enigma to me for several years. I haven’t been confident in product direction, where different elements of process automation would fit, and would it make a transition to software. Then came Honeywell Forge. Where did that fit with Process Solutions and UOP? Then we had the pandemic and I couldn’t make the User Group this year due to many conflicts.

This is mostly my deficiency, but also I had lost track of contacts. All that is remedied, and the picture is beginning to focus. I was also able to catch some virtual conferences to gain insight from CTO Jason Urso.

Honeywell Forge is coalescing into a viable software division. Process Solutions is cranking out some interesting new products and services. Sustainability is a key strategy. Cybersecurity remains strong within the portfolio.

I’m quite late with this update. Following are major points from recent announcements. Check out the various links for more.

Manufacturing Excellence Platform

Manufacturing Excellence platform provides real-time end-to-end production visualization and dashboards for multiple user roles from operators to management, process unit timelines, detailed equipment status, and trends of critical process parameters. The Manufacturing Excellence platform, built for Life Sciences applications, puts actionable information in context in one interface. The solution digitizes paper-based batch records, work instructions, and logbooks to ensure consistent compliance with standard operating procedures.

Honeywell Forge Performance+

As part of the new Honeywell Forge Performance+ for Industrials suite, Asset Performance helps deliver asset reliability and energy efficiency through real-time monitoring of assets using predictive models embedded with deep-domain expertise. Asset Performance can help to both detect potential asset health issues and predict possible time to failure in order to proactively improve plant availability.

Enhancements to Existing Honeywell Software Solutions

  • Honeywell Plantwide Optimizer – End-to-end solution that integrates planning, operations and blending in near real time.
  • Honeywell Operations Management – Enhancements to the user experience designed to help industrial operations managers to better proactively monitor, document and operate their industrial processes to reduce downtime, increase throughput and yields, and standardize shift reporting.
  • Honeywell Workforce Competency – Enhancements to the simulation-based experiential learning solution to develop and enhance the competency of today’s industrial workforce include persona-based dashboards and a new soft Safety Manager direct link.

Cybersecurity

Honeywell’s AMIR managed service brings increased cybersecurity capabilities to an organization’s existing Security Operation Centers (SOCs) to strengthen OT cybersecurity across the enterprise.

Cyber App Control, previously known as Application Whitelisting, is a vendor-agnostic cybersecurity solution suitable for both Honeywell and non-Honeywell control systems designed to provide an additional layer of security that allows only known and trusted applications to run on ICS assets and increases a customer’s ability to prevent known malware and zero-day attacks on OT environments that often rely on more vulnerable legacy systems with challenging maintenance schedules.

Honeywell Forge Sustainability+

• An enterprise solution that measures fugitive and process GHG emission leaks, continuously monitors sites for new or remediated emissions, reports on emissions’ status and drives emission reduction strategies and solutions.

• Innovative gas detection technologies with Honeywell Versatilis Signal Scout gas detector and Gas Cloud Imaging, interfaces with Emissions Management for continuous measuring and monitoring of emissions, enabling customers to better manage GHG emissions proactively in near real-time. 

• Reporting of process emissions with site- and enterprise-level trending and visualization that allows organizations to locate methane leaks that may cause production loss or impact worker safety, as well as gain access to metrics and alarms associated with gas leaks.

• Enterprise-wide accounting, visualization and reporting that eliminates periodic manual reporting and provides a holistic, near real-time view of Scope 1 emissions for HSE professionals and executive teams.

Honeywell and Aramco JV for Business Process Software

Honeywell and Aramco have announced the signing of a joint venture (JV) agreement to provide a set of end-to-end business process automation solutions, under the Aramco Namaat Industrial Investments Program. The technology solutions can be offered to a wide range of industrial sectors to help maximize profitability, improve productivity, sustainability and operational excellence, on a global scale. The new JV offerings will leverage Aramco’s Plant.Digital platform (formerly Integrated Manufacturing Operations Management System – iMOMS) as well as Honeywell Connected Enterprise’s technology development and industrial digital solutions implementation experience.

The JV aims to equip industrial companies with the tools, processes and practices they need to run plant operations more effectively and accelerate sustainable digital transformation and operational excellence initiatives. It will emphasize the development, integration, and deployment of Operations Technology (OT) solutions and Digital Transformation consulting.

The new JV is expected to create more than 300 jobs in Saudi Arabia within five years, supporting the Aramco Namaat Industrial Investments Program, which is designed to boost Saudi economic and workforce development.

Partnership for Track and Trace Solutions

Honeywell announced that Imperial Brands, a British multinational tobacco company, has chosen Honeywell to provide the Honeywell Track & Trace solution (“Honeywell Track & Trace”) to digitalize and transform the monitoring and tracking of their supply chain operations.

In addition to the cloud-based Honeywell Track & Trace solution, Honeywell will provide a comprehensive and integrated system of support, professional services, and governance to help Imperial’s business meet critical requirements for compliance and executing its global supply chain.

Automation Fair Attracts Large Crowd, Exhibits New Technology

There was Automation Fair and then meetings and then Thanksgiving. Plenty of time to digest everything I learned and experienced at Rockwell Automation’s event. They skipped 2020, of course. The 2021 event in Houston was abbreviated. This one held at Chicago’s McCormick Place resembled all the pre-Covid events. More than 15,000 attendees, lots of presentations and learning opportunities, and many Rockwell and partner exhibits.

I wrote a quick update with the themes I picked up. Here is a recap.

Themes

  • Emphasis on partners working together—specifically Festo, Zededa, Stratus
  • Connected Enterprise is still central, connectivity is everywhere
  • Cloud is everywhere
  • Use technology the right way
  • Enable humans to make better decisions

The big three things Rockwell spokespeople referenced were FactoryTalk Design Hub, FactoryTalk Edge, and cloud. The cloud discussion involved Design Hub, Plex, and Fiix. Plex, the cloud-based MES software replaced PTC as the focus of software discussion. PTC’s stand, though, with ThingWorx and Vuforia, was constantly busy—so much so that I never squeezed in for a talk. Fiix is the cloud-based CMMS package. I think these were meaningful acquisitions that will add value now and in the future.

Specifics — Rockwell Automation Products

FactoryTalk Design Hub

Transform automation design capabilities with a more simplified, productive way to work powered by the cloud. There are five core applications.

  • FactoryTalk Design Studio—cloud-native software product built from the ground up to improve system design efficiency. Teams can collaborate with automated tools to share and merge changes, and project sizes can scale dynamically with support for multiple controllers in a single project.
  • FactoryTalk Optix—addition to the visualization portfolio, the first cloud-enabled HMI product to be launched within FactoryTalk Design Hub. 
  • FactoryTalk Twin Studio—end-to-end automation design solution where users can design, program, simulate, emulate, and virtually commission in one cloud environment.
  • FactoryTalk Vault—secure, cloud-native centralized storage for manufacturing design teams. 
  • FactoryTalk Remote Access—enables secure connections to equipment. 

FactoryTalk Edge

An intelligent edge management and orchestration SaaS platform with an edge application ecosystem – based on zero trust security and open industry standards – accelerating digital transformation for industrial customers.

FactoryTalk Edge Gateway (FTEG)

Connects operational technology to informational technology. FTEG tools scan the EtherNet/IP network to discover devices. 

FactoryTalk Smart Object (FTSO)

A simplified way to organize data for easy collection by the controller and subsequent transfer to IIoT systems. The FTSO Config Tool creates the base code for the tags the user selects to be included in data models.

On Machine Products

  • ArmorKinetix distributed servo drives provide the Kinetix 5700 platform in a compact, On-Machine form factor.
  • ArmorBlock 5000 I/O—Distributed I/O blocks with IO-Link technology
  • Armor PowerFlex—A new generation of On-Machine VFD motor control solutions that provide an integrated, near-motor solution where reducing installation time and cost are most critical.

Specifics — Partners

Festo

  • With the Festo CPX-FB36 bus node now recognized by FTEG, basic diagnostic information from smart pneumatic devices such as Festo valve terminals and energy saving pneumatic devices are easily accessible.
  • Add-on instructions can be used by FTSO that access timestamp values for the extension and retraction of pneumatic cylinders. This information is accessible to FTEG.
  • Data collected by FTEG can be shared with Festo AX software, the new AI solution from Festo that can improve machine utilization and quality, lower waste, and ensure energy optimization. Festo AX provides a bridge between advanced analytics arising from operational technology, such as that collected by FTEG, and IT-based business intelligence. Festo AX can run directly on the system (on-edge), on servers (on-premises), or in the cloud.

Zededa

Zededa announced a supply agreement with Rockwell Automation to provide distributed edge management and orchestration capabilities—incorporated as part of FactoryTalk edge management offering.

Automation Fair 2023 First Impression

The third day of my 25th Automation Fair by Rockwell Automation experience is winding up. I have many notes to sort through. New products. New initiatives. Many new people; many familiar people.

Many of my media colleagues are in San Francisco rather than Chicago. That company pays expenses. I’m keeping my expenses minor here.

Some initial key thoughts about this 31st edition of Automation Fair by Rockwell Automation:

  • Emphasis on partners working together
  • Connected Enterprise is still central, connectivity is everywhere
  • Almost two days elapsed before I heard “metaverse” (thank God)
  • Cloud is everywhere
  • Use technology the right way
  • Enable humans to make better decisions

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