Managing Automation - September 2007 - (Page 9)

official company-wide guidance for full-year 2007 is organic sales growth of more than 10%.) Looking at the market’s growth drivers, Crochon says a variety of factors are cause for optimism. “There are massive electrification needs worldwide, which are being driven by rising demands for energy,” he says. “In addition, companies more and more are outsourcing non-core competencies. And automation is everywhere.” Twelve-hundred miles to the east, in Nuremberg, Germany, sits the headquarters of another of the world’s larger automation providers, the £13 billion Automation & Drives group of giant Siemens AG. A&D, as it is called, is one of Siemens’ six major businesses. They are: Information and Communications, Automation and Control, Power, Transportation, Medical, and Lighting. In its fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2006, Siemens had sales from continuing operations of £87.3 billion. In its recent third-quarter financial report, A&D’s revenue grew 19% to £3.8 billion. Anton S. Huber, a group vice president, said in an interview that he expects the full year to show double-digit growth. Huber, who is also on the board of design software maker UGS, which Siemens acquired in May for $3.5 billion, says his plan is to grow the factory automation business at twice the market rate. ARC Advisory Group, in a report to be published by November, estimates that the combined discrete and process automation markets totaled $95 billion in 2006, and will grow 6.5% to 7% for the next couple of years. A&D, like Schneider and other automation suppliers, has been emphasizing so-called “solutions” for customers for some time. But now, with the inclusion of UGS, Siemens’ product portfolio — extending from CAD through the manufacturing execution system layer of technology — is broader than that of most suppliers. “The long-term trend is that customers are getting rid of do-it-yourself competencies,” Huber says. “Lots of customers are reducing this internal investment in automation. Solutions are needed. We are now supporting the business processes of customers.” An important part of the move to solutions for an automation company is dealing with heterogeneous control environments. Both Schneider and Siemens advocate open architectures. “We have to have open interfaces,” Huber says. “Complexity in technology is driving this.” For its part, Schneider in April said that it has become a principal member of ODVA, an association of control and automation companies that support network technologies using the Common Industrial Protocol. In talking with western industrial customers, Huber says, the single biggest business issue that comes up is how they will deal with competition from China and India. When talking with Chinese manufacturers, the issue, he says, is how they can get their products to western markets. Huber believes the answer to both of these questions — and a key rationale for the acquisition of UGS — is speed, in all its many manifestations. “Our business is about time,” he says. “You have to be fast. You have to innovate. You have to believe in automation.” Scan M Back inMA MA SEPTEMBER 2006 A’s editors sifted through technology companies and products to bring 10 innovators into focus for readers in this second-annual “10 Companies to Watch” cover story. The companies’ products spanned a broad spectrum of manufacturing technologies, from enterprise application software, to on-demand ERP and MES systems, to supply chain planning, to wireless sensor networks, and more. VENDOR COALITION PUSHES HUMAN ELEMENT OF SOA n the road to service-oriented architectures, someone forgot to pack the people. So says a group of software companies with a stake in SOA’s future. Comprising Active Endpoints; Adobe Systems, Inc.; BEA Systems, Inc.; IBM; Oracle Corp.; and SAP AG, the coalition earlier this summer moved to address that supposed omission by submitting a BPEL4People specification to OASIS, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing open technology standards. At the heart of the matter is the business process execution language (BPEL) that some developers use to orchestrate the processes in a service-oriented architecture. “The thing with BPEL is that it only deals with automated processes,” says Tony Baer, principal of onStrategies, a technology analyst firm. BPEL4People is actually an umbrella term covering two proposed standards — BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask. The logic underpinning the would-be specifications is that almost any business process flow, no matter how automated, demands human intervention sooner or later. Baer offers the Tony Baer example of the “available to promise” process in manufacturing. In a services-oriented IT environment, a customer’s request for expedited delivery may trigger a series of mini IT processes or services — checking the product stock for availability, determining MA SEPTEMBER 2002 R O ather than heading for the scrap heap, old workhorse distributed control systems were being re-cast in a knowledge management role within developing business process management technology. DCS systems were refashioned to use unified databases, Web technology, and middleware to improve the flow of information across plant operations and into the enterprise, which was becoming increasingly distributed under the influences of globalization, outsourcing, and environmental and safety regulations. M A S E P T E M B E R 19 9 7 A’s editors asked eight industry leaders to discuss their progress in moving enterprise-wide integration from vision to reality. The PC, Windows NT, and the Internet, among other technological advances, gave companies the tools they needed to begin to marry their process systems with their business systems. With the integration of data from the plant floor and the boardroom, manufacturers found they could speed up their responsiveness to customer demands. M M A S E P T E M B E R 19 9 2 A fter the 1991 publication of standardized guidelines defining application identifiers, the development of two-dimensional codes, and advances in bar-code printers, bar coding took a major leap forward in data collection in the manufacturing environment. The semiconductor industry led the charge among manufacturers, driven by the need to bar code individual chips and packages. Other industries, such as chemicals, aerospace, and metals processing, were also increasing their use of bar codes. September 2007 9

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Managing Automation - September 2007

Contents Take 1 Europe’s Automation Chiefs Upbeat on ’08 Business Prospects Vendor Coalition Pushes Human Element of SOA Wireless: Users Still Approaching with Caution One Year Later, IBM Shows Plan for MRO’s Maximo Study: More Work Needed to Lure Next-Gen Talent Executive Q&A Notes Cover Story: 2008 Companies to Watch Special Report: The 2007 Progressive Manufacturing High Achievers Progressive Manufacturer of the Year Business Model Mastery Innovation Mastery Customer Mastery Supply Network Mastery Data & Integration Mastery Education & Training Mastery Operational Excellence Mastery Leadership Mastery Transformation: Orchestrating the Multi-Tier Supply Network Integration: The Timeless Quest for Accurate Data Industries: Maintenance No Longer on Schedule Product Scan Advertiser Index Next

Managing Automation - September 2007

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