The solution promises to transform enterprises’ automation design capabilities.
Global industrial automation and digital transformation provider Rockwell Automation just launched its FactoryTalk Design Hub to help companies achieve more productive automation design workflows.
The platform is geared for industrial organizations that are seeking faster time-to-market for their products. FactoryTalk Design Hub is based on a portfolio of core solutions that can help elevate automation design capabilities by harnessing cloud computing for a more simplified and productive approach.
Designing in the cloud allows dispersed teams of various sizes and skillsets to collaborate more effectively, benefiting from improved lifecycle management and on-demand access to cloud-based software. According to Rockwell, this yields increased design productivity, faster time-to-market and systems that cost less to build and maintain.
The improved automation project development and deployment that the FactoryTalk Design Hub enables is paired with the latest security and IT standards, which allows teams to access designs from any web browser using up-to-date software that can be flexibly scaled with more users and higher compute capacity as project workload demands grow. These capabilities offer an advantage over traditional design software that often provide limited pathways for collaboration, scalability and productivity.
The FactoryTalk Design Hub yields its automation design benefits through the following five core solutions:
FactoryTalk Design Studio: A cloud-native software that improves system design efficiency and only requires a web browser to run. It reduces development time and boosts team collaboration through automated tools for sharing and merging changes, dynamic project scaling, and provider support for multiple controllers in a single project.
FactoryTalk Optix Software: Part of Rockwell Automation’s visualization portfolio, this offering is FactoryTalk Design Hub’s first cloud-enabled HMI product. It allows users to design, test, and deploy applications directly from a web browser. It also delivers cloud-based connectivity options for flexible collaboration and design modifications.
FactoryTalk Twin Studio: A cloud-hosted ecosystem available using a web browser that allows users to design, program, simulate and virtually commission in one environment.
FactoryTalk Vault: Provides secure, cloud-active centralized storage for manufacturing design teams that also features advanced Design Tools providing insights into designs through in-depth analysis of controller projects.
FactoryTalk Remote Access Solution: Provides dispersed teams with the ability to access the Hub with secure connections from anywhere to resolve any production issues that arise, reducing the need for travel and asset downtime.
In addition to its launch of FactoryTalk Hub Design, Rockwell has also partnered with industrial data software Cognite to harness its industrial data operations platform Cognite Data Fusion to create an industrial data hub that can enable enterprise-wide scaling.
“Manufacturers of all sizes struggle with getting access to, and value from, their data. A unifying information hub can provide a single source of truth for all manufacturing data without a major investment in proprietary and costly platforms,” said Rockwell’s Brian Shepherd, senior vice president of Software & Control, in a press release. “The bigger a company is, the harder it is to pull data together from all the different sources and then get meaningful analytic insights affordably. Our partnership with Cognite will directly address these challenges.”
