NAM Board Chair Blake Moret Talks Factory Digitization, AI at Rethink

The technological advances taking place in factories everywhere are improving the quality of life for the world’s population, Rockwell Automation Chairman and CEO and NAM Board Chair Blake Moret said recently.

What’s going on: “What [manufacturers] collectively do is really important to the quality of life for billions of people around the world today,” said Moret on a panel at Rethink, the Manufacturing Leadership Council’s yearly conference on digital technology and manufacturing innovation, last month. (The MLC is the NAM’s digital transformation arm.)

• “Making medicine, there’s a pretty clear bright [connection] between what you do and improving the standard of living for people who want to live longer, healthier lives. Same with food and beverage and transportation and energy. [They’re] all very highly correlated,” he continued.

The pandemic factor: The supply chain challenges of COVID-19 forced manufacturers to scrap and revise their resilience planning—and that’s paid off even in the absence of a global health crisis, Moret said.

• “In the past, we of course talked about things like resilience and redundancy, but often the investments necessary for that never rose to the level of funding,” he told the audience. The pandemic “impressed on some of us who were living through that with the necessity of more resilience than ever before. And some of that manifested in terms of building more physical plants here in the U.S. … The other is the speed of adoption” of technologies.
• COVID-19 pushed companies to exploit many technologies much more comprehensively, he added. “We always had the technology to be able to come in and to do some of these things remotely, but simulation, remote access got a huge boost during that period.”
• Now, thanks to the pandemic’s lessons, technological-tool adoption is “accelerating,” Moret said.

AI: Rockwell, a leader in automation equipment manufacturing, is using AI both internally and in customer-facing applications, he went on.

• In determining the best uses of AI, “we look at things that provide process simplification and speed and very defined processes,” he continued, adding that Rockwell has an internal AI Center of Excellence to ensure protection of private information and efficient use of the technology.
• Looking forward, “I think that the [biggest] benefit of AI in the automation and digital transformation world is simplification. The way that you design systems, the way that you commission them, operate them, maintain them, AI is going to have a profound impact on all those phases of a project lifecycle.”