Rockwell Automation’s Asia-Pacific Business Centre (APBC) has won the gold award at the 2016 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards. The company won The Award for Excellence in the category of Innovation in Manufacturing Industries, which recognises its success in achieving optimal performance and profitability through ‘The Connected Enterprise’.
“Rockwell Automation penned ‘The Connected Enterprise’ to describe the convergence of plant-floor operations technology (OT) with enterprise-based information technology (IT),” said Co Gia Nguyen, Rockwell’s APBC vice president and general manager.
According to the company, prior to introducing The Connected Enterprise, the APBC was challenged with manual reporting from countless data points, records, devices and sites. Divergent networks lacked a common, standard and secure industrial protocol, resulting in ineffective process management, inaccuracies, delays and lack of integration between the plant floor and enterprise teams.
The introduction of the new concept led to “measurable results”, said the company’s manufacturing director, Pit Wee Yeoh.
“We cut inventory from 115 to 70 days and shrank capital expenditures by 20 per cent per year. Our on-time delivery improved from the low 90s to 99 per cent and our supplier lead times went down by 25 per cent as well. At the same time, we reduced quality defects by 50 per cent. Overall, APBC increased annual productivity by four to five per cent,” she added.