At Automation Fair last month, I participated in several sessions and industry forums as part of Cisco's participation in this event, which is Rockwell Automation's largest user conference. What struck me were some of the urgency for many manufacturers in investing in key technologies in their plant environment. It was quite serendipitous, since we announced enhancements to ourConnected Factoryoffering in terms of wireless features. Many of the customers I spoke to had specific wireless use cases in mind for their particular factory floor.

Specifically, we spoke to several well-known Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Aerospace companies, and the drive to improve efficiencies through machine monitoring and new analytics to reduce costs or downtime is spurring new investments in IoT initiatives and projects.   According to my colleague Randall Kenworthy, Practice Director for CPG and Life Sciences, CPG companies are pursuing 3 strategies: "Connect," "Secure," and "Virtualize." Most of the assets being used to make products are still dark, securing food safety and intellectual property in an escalating threat environment, and virtualizing plant floors to increase uptime and lower costs. Randall presented to a packed room of nearly 400 attendees in the CPG forum at Automation Fair.

What is interesting today is that a full 'Plant of the Future' concept is no longer a 'pie-in-the sky' vision but rather a real-life, tested solution that can be deployable today. Take a look at this overview video describing the prime use cases and components of a Connected Factory:

The infographic below encapsulates many of the business outcomes manufacturers are seeking to achieve and how the Connected Factory can make your 'Plant of the Future' a reality today: productivity, output increase, innovation acceleration, and energy efficiency. What are your plans to make the Plant of the Future a reality for your factory? Tell us more in the comments below. Thanks for reading.