Could you provide an overview of Rockwell Automation’s presence and capabilities in Southeast Asia?

Rockwell Automation has a strong presence in Southeast Asia with our APAC headquarters based in Singapore. The city-state is also home to a manufacturing plant that serves as a global hub. Outside of Singapore, we have offices in the six main Southeast Asian countries, as well as additional manufacturing capabilities in China and India, with a new plant recently inaugurated in Chennai bolstering our APAC capacities. 

How has the notion of digital transformation evolved, and where are we now?

We see a leap from digital manufacturing to fully autonomous manufacturing. This is where we are moving towards: operations where the system can make its own decisions using AI and predictive analysis and whereby humans shift into different tasks. Rockwell has recently acquired a company called Clearpath Robotics, which is a leader in autonomous mobile robots (AMR) technology. Robots can be deployed at the manufacturing site to run transports autonomously. 

What role do digital twins play in the plant of the future?

The most data we have in the world today comes from the manufacturing floor. But how much and how well that data is used by industrial companies is not comprehensive. Many of our customers do know how to manage that data. AI and digital twins represent new tools to simplify that journey; using virtual reality, the industry can manage their plants, simulate scenarios to understand what happens if something if a new machine is added or something else is changed, and essentially make better and more conscious business decisions. Digital twins are used in both existing assets – for instance, to check what happens if a modification is made to the plant and what is the minimal capital expenditure and shortest time frame to implement – as well as in new builds, when a plant is designed from scratch to see how the plant will look like and predict many last minute items before they happen. 

Could you familiarize our readers with CUBIC, now deployed in Southeast Asia?

CUBIC is an acquisition made over a year ago, bringing into Rockwell’s portfolio a very nice flat-pack technology to build electrical panels with almost, I would say, brand-agnostic components. Traditionally, existing alternatives to CUBIC on the market can only work with their own components, forcing customers to invest heavily in a lot of machinery to make them compatible. To draw an analogy, CUBIC uses the IKEA principle whereby you assemble the pieces yourself without any special machinery in advance, so it is very flexible and comes at low upfront costs for the buyer. CUBIC has been rolled out in Southeast Asia with amazing results, growing extremely fast and proving to be a great fit for the region.

What do you think makes Rockwell Automation the automation partner of choice for the chemical industry?

Everything we do is around manufacturing – this is our biggest differentiator. Every one of our employees in this region is dedicated to helping the industry be more efficient. That is all we know. As a philosophy, we do not work around technology, but around solving problems. This is our DNA.