Rockwell Automation’s new offering is said to merge improved collaboration and productivity for design teams
October 13, 2022
MILWAUKEE— Rockwell Automation, Inc., a company known for its dedication to industrial automation and digital transformation, recently launched its FactoryTalk® Design Hub™, the company said in a release.
According to Rockwell Automation, FactoryTalk Design Hub enables industrial organizations to transform their automation design capabilities with a more simplified, productive way to work, powered by the cloud. Teams of all sizes, skillsets, and locations can work more smartly through enhanced collaboration, improved lifecycle management, and on-demand access to cloud-based software. The result is increased design productivity, faster time to market, and systems that cost less to build and maintain, the company said.
“In this new age of ‘work from anywhere,’ having centralized, on-demand design tools is critical for businesses to scale production and easily adapt to evolving customer needs,” said Brian Shepherd, senior vice president of software and control, Rockwell, in the release. “FactoryTalk Design Hub gives manufacturing engineers access to the full breadth of Rockwell Automation tools and capabilities in a centralized nexus for successful design and collaboration across their team and the greater enterprise.”
FactoryTalk Design Hub is said to improve development and deployment of automation projects for industrial organizations, while adhering to the latest security standards and information technology (IT) best practices. It enables teams to access designs on demand, from any web browser, with up-to-date software that flexibly scales users and compute capacity to meet project workload demands.
“The digital transformation of automation design capabilities requires both the cloud to maximize control system developers’ productivity, and it also requires that all software tools are connected to each other by a digital thread to maximize collaboration, scalability, and productivity,” said Craig Resnick, vice president, ARC Advisory Group, in a statement.
“Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk Design Hub enables seamless digital thread connectivity between its design, visualization, digital twin, storage, and remote access software tools that provide control system developers with immediate on-demand access to all automation designs as needed, regardless of their location, helping these companies to accelerate their initiatives ranging from digital transformation to IT/OT convergence.”
According to the release, traditional software design approaches limit collaboration, scalability, and productivity. FactoryTalk Design Hub is said to address these three primary concerns for all automation workflow design needs.
“I’m really excited that Rockwell Automation is putting the resources behind this type of development on behalf of control system developers everywhere,” said Doug Hoffer, senior automation engineer at Samuel Engineering, in the release. “This could become a really significant way to tie cloud functionality and analytics to the control system development process.”
One of the five core capabilities offered by FactoryTalk Design Hub is FactoryTalk® Design Studio™, a new cloud-native software product built from the ground up to improve system design efficiency. Reported to be available anytime, anywhere using only a web browser, it requires no downloads, installs, or software maintenance responsibility.
Beginning with controller design, FactoryTalk Design Studio is said to reduce development time by leveraging modern software development practices and an integrated version control system. Teams can collaborate easily with automated tools to share and merge changes, and project sizes can scale dynamically with support for multiple controllers in a single project, the company said.
Another core capability is FactoryTalk® Vault™, which is said to provide secure, cloud-native, centralized storage for manufacturing design teams. With its modern version and access control, FactoryTalk Vault with advanced Design Tools reportedly enables greater insights into designs through in-depth analysis of controller projects. Teams can now spend more time working on projects and less time searching for files or working from outdated versions, the company said.
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