Companies often spend a lot of effort and energy to figure out how they performed in the past. Rockwell Automation has released a solution that puts a company in control of how it will perform in the future.

According to the World Economic Forum, in 2021 industries created, captured, copied and consumed 74 zettabytes of data – by 2023 that was estimated to rise to 130 zettabytes with one zettabyte equal to a trillion gigabytes. This rapidly growing volume of data is causing serious problems for organisations.

While most sectors have seen rapid growth in data analytical solutions, industrial automation has been an exception.

This is the case even though production data holds the key to insights into operational performance. Huge volumes of data on their own are not meaningful and engineers can spend up to 60 percent of their time gathering, cleaning, and collating data rather than driving insights.

Putting data at the centre

Rockwell Automation is taking a unique approach to address this issue. “Data is the centre of our strategy,” said Manish Jain, strategy leader – data, AI, and edge computing, Rockwell Automation. “Data needs to be organised, structured, and analysed to unlock insights that drive value for companies.”

The company recently unveiled Factory Talk Data Mosaix which contextualises and merges engineering technology data with OT and IT data into one solution with the goal of full production automation.

 “AI will drive this process, but it needs valid data and good analytics,” said Jain. For example, data can provide insights into root cause analysis and future predictions, and function as a single source of truth to solve challenging problems.

By integrating data from any vendor and all parts of the production system, it will make data available, meaningful, and useful so that standard applications and custom app development platforms can make data valuable.

With Rockwell’s solution, manufacturers will be able to extract more value from their data by making complex industrial data easy to access and understand. Importantly, FactoryTalk DataMosaix provides the capability to use and re-use data across a variety of applications.

Generative AI for rapid app creation

Rockwell Automation provides solutions from the device level through to the cloud. The company has taken a holistic view and developed software for every level – controller, edge, data ops, and application.

A major trend spreading across industry is the growing use of retrieval-augmented generation or knowledge graphs, an AI framework that categorises data from all sources of knowledge to improve the quality of responses

This natural language processing technique is commonly used to make large language models more accurate and up to date. “The challenge is to create a more unified data model with generative AI, and this will lead to more rapid new app creation,” said Jain.

Another significant development transforming the industry is the rise of low-code/no-code platforms to drive rapid development. Users are provided with visual software development environments where they can drag and drop program components, link them, and watch what occurs.

According to Gartner’ Research, by 2025, 70 percent of new apps built by enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies.

 The exponential growth of data also necessitates the need for solutions to solve latency issues associated with voluminous data processing. By processing data at the network edge, manufacturers can collect and analyse data locally, allowing for real-time decision-making.