US-based Rock­well Au­toma­tion, the world's largest com­pa­ny ded­i­cat­ed to in­dus­tri­al au­toma­tion and in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy, was in T&T re­cent­ly where they part­nered with their on­ly lo­cal au­tho­rised dis­trib­u­tor, War­ren-ECM of Char­lieville, Ch­agua­nas, to train key peo­ple from var­i­ous in­dus­tries to im­prove com­pet­i­tive­ness.

With T&T fac­ing an eco­nom­ic down­turn, over 70 com­pa­nies from the oil and gas sec­tors, food and bev­er­age, wa­ter and waste wa­ter man­age­ment/ util­i­ties, HVAC and elec­tri­cal con­trac­tors took part in the two-day pro­gramme, geared at lever­ag­ing re­al-time de­ci­sion-mak­ing to dri­ve prof­itabil­i­ty.

Rock­well Au­toma­tion shared with these com­pa­nies so­lu­tions and trends to help them be­come in­dus­try lead­ers.

They were ex­posed to the In­dus­tri­al In­ter­net of Things (IoT) and ad­vance­ments in en­abling tech­nolo­gies in­clud­ing da­ta an­a­lyt­ics, re­mote mon­i­tor­ing and mo­bil­i­ty. This sup­ports the vi­sion of a Con­nect­ed En­ter­prise which opens new worlds of op­por­tu­ni­ty through greater con­nec­tiv­i­ty and in­for­ma­tion shar­ing.

"The Con­nect­ed En­ter­prise helps op­er­a­tions man­agers prof­itably man­age and im­prove man­u­fac­tur­ing and in­dus­tri­al process­es. It helps IT ex­ec­u­tives re­duce net­work com­plex­i­ties and ex­po­sure to in­for­ma­tion se­cu­ri­ty risks. It shares pro­duc­tiv­i­ty-im­prov­ing in­for­ma­tion to work­ers across the or­gan­i­sa­tion in a con­text that is mean­ing­ful for each role.

"The in­for­ma­tion-en­abled Con­nect­ed En­ter­prise is a more com­pet­i­tive en­ter­prise. It cre­ates tremen­dous op­por­tu­ni­ties for those tak­ing ad­van­tage and great risks for those not prepar­ing a strate­gic re­sponse," ac­cord­ing to Rock­well Au­toma­tion.

Fur­ther, cap­i­tal­is­ing the met­rics as­so­ci­at­ed with Big Da­ta, these prod­ucts, so­lu­tions and train­ing of­fer­ings en­able in­dus­tries to im­prove their process­es and mod­ernise their plant and equip­ment which can lead to ad­di­tion­al cost sav­ings and high­er ef­fi­cien­cies.

The or­gan­is­ers con­clud­ed that in­vest­ments tak­en at this time can lead to pos­i­tive out­comes that are sim­i­lar to McK­in­sey's study of the 1990s.The McK­in­sey Quar­ter­ly (June 2002) pub­lished re­search that tracked near­ly 1,000 US in­dus­tri­al com­pa­nies from a range of sec­tors from 1982 to 1999, which in­clud­ed the re­ces­sion of 1990 to 1991.

McK­in­sey's analy­sis re­vealed that lag­ging com­pa­nies that be­came lead­ers, post-re­ces­sion in­vest­ed pro­por­tion­al­ly more than their com­pet­i­tive set in in­no­va­tion, and lead­ing com­pa­nies that re­tained their lead­er­ship po­si­tion spent pro­por­tion­al­ly more on re­search and de­vel­op­ment dur­ing the re­ces­sion than their peers who lost lead­er­ship po­si­tions.

Through­out the world, Rock­well Au­toma­tion flag­ship Allen-Bradley and Rock­well Soft­ware prod­ucts brands are recog­nised for in­no­va­tion and ex­cel in con­ti­nents and coun­tries such as the Mid­dle East, Eu­rope, Africa, North and South Amer­i­ca, Venezuela, and T&T.