Manufacturing Solutions

Machine builders, parts suppliers, and end manufacturers must work together to compete in the global marketplace by building cars faster, better and at a lower total cost. Rockwell Automation's industry-leading automotive solutions help manage your information across the entire value chain — including engineering, manufacturing, suppliers, and customers — so that you can continuously improve product quality and deliver vehicles to market faster.

Our solutions provide enterprise visibility, product tracking, and operational control spanning the complete automotive build cycle. With nearly 100 years of experience in the automotive industry, our global network of 5,600 distributors and agents, 1000 service engineers; consultants and project managers working in more than 80 countries can help you develop and maintain a real marketplace advantage.

 

Reduced Launch Time

We understand that your success requires bringing vehicles to market faster and at a lower total cost. To help you achieve this goal, our integrated architecture (which includes the Logix5000 platform) simplifies system integration with a common control model scalable to your exact requirements. This platform includes Sequential, Process, Motion, and Drives with common programming to reduce development time, to get your products to market faster.

This integration leverages the unique capabilities of:

  • NetLinx — an open network architecture allowing for configuration, control and data collection across multiple networks
  • Visualization — offers a common look, feel, navigation and scalability across platforms
  • FactoryTalk® — a collaborative framework and global database to secure and share real time information for tracking and tracing

Benefits of this integration include:

  • Integrated enterprise visibility of plant production data for fact-based management decision-making and faster response time to process issues
  • Repeatable engineering practices, coupled with known, validated solutions that cut development time and costs, minimize downtime, and reduce the need for engineering change orders
  • Maximized returns from existing assets, through greatly improved control and monitoring
  • Proven solutions for integration management that optimize supplier processes, enforce exacting product standards, and identify and eliminate bottleneck

Agile & Lean Manufacturing

With global competition intensifying and niche markets evolving, collaboration among companies in the automotive value chain is absolutely essential. This is even more important due to the shorter production times required for build-to-order products. To be truly successful your manufacturing environment needs to be both agile and lean. Rockwell Automation's information-enabled architecture provides a collaborative framework to share and use real time information. This results in manufacturers and suppliers gaining the agility required in the constantly changing automotive environment.

In fact, our plant-floor solutions have proven flexible and modular enough to manufacture to order — down to a lot size of one. All of this means getting vehicles out faster, better and with maximized quality control. Our two decades of lean manufacturing experience focus on making your production processes perform quickly and accurately, while reducing waste and rework by offering:

Benefits include:
  • Repeatable engineering practices that reduce development time and costs
  • Maximized returns from existing assets, through greatly improved control and monitoring
  • Faster response time to market, product or component demands

Regulatory Compliance & Safety

Multi-level global outsourcing, distributed manufacturing and assembly operations all underscore the critical need to maintain a comprehensive program of quality and regulatory compliance management. The potential for liabilities associated with warranty or recall issues heightens the need for information and management solutions. Rockwell Automation provides instant access and extended enterprise visibility to vital manufacturing data, including plant-floor quality and compliance related information, activities and events.

Our commitment to helping you produce vehicles faster also includes our focus on creating processes and systems that assure worker safety. In fact, Rockwell Automation has the widest portfolio of safety products and systems in the world. These applications adhere to industry safety regulations such as ANSI-B11, EN954-1, IEC 60204-1 and others. We guide customers in applying safety solutions which reduce lost time accidents, enhance work-place safety, and improve employee morale, to enhance overall plant productivity around the globe.

World-wide Opportunities

The expansion of global distribution, supply, and manufacturing capabilities has increased the challenge of maintaining manufacturing standards and consistency. Often, global machine suppliers build and design to engineering standards that are dissimilar to yours. You may face additional product consistency issues when manufacturing at facilities that are outside of your company's headquartered country. It's critical to ensure that your operations comply with local, environmental, regulatory and cultural requirements and Rockwell Automation can help.

Rockwell Automation is on the plant floor supporting automotive companies in more than 80 countries. Our people, processes, global services, and distribution network combine to help our customers leverage opportunities and produce the world-class products that help them build market share every day.

Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty

In the end, the measure of your true success is the ability to consistently win the loyalty of consumers, launch after launch. For the end consumer this means being able to enjoy an exceptional driving experience with the confidence and pride that comes from owning a quality vehicle. For machine builders, plant suppliers, and end manufacturers, this means getting quality parts when they need them.

Rockwell Automation manufacturing control and information solutions help you maximize throughput while expanding the variety of platform mix on existing lines, but also provide comprehensive tracking, error proofing and sequencing solutions such as Andon and Vehicle/Part Tracking. Combined with early warning systems, these solutions can catch and control any product or production issue before it becomes a problem. Our solutions can automatically present work instructions to operators and equipment, examine work results and compare them to established standards. Combined with a trained workforce these solutions help drive defects out of products and processes.