Rockwell Automation, the world's largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, is betting big on India. “We have 4,500 workforces here, making India the third biggest country in terms of workforce for Rockwell Automation globally. We are investing in India as there is a good revenue trajectory. We are bullish on India as the market is expanding and GDP projection is better. India is going to be one of the topmost countries for Rockwell Automation,” said Arvind Kakru, Director – Sales, Rockwell Automation India while addressing media at its Digital Transformation Experience Center (DTEC) in Gurugram recently. The idea was to demonstrate the services offered by the Center to help the industry automate and digitalize. 

Rockwell has more than 10,000 clients/customers/partners in India. The company has a vast network and inroads into the Indian industry and further looking at expanding the operational horizon. "Our client retention rate is 90%+," said Kakru.   

The Centre is designed to inform and inspire Indian businesses about creative ways to spark productivity gains using automation. It demonstrates the integration of key technology platforms such as network, cyber security, industrial data centre, machine learning as well as augmented and virtual reality. The Center offers various scenarios showcasing how a business could fix problems faster with less disruption to production by combining data on machinery faults, production commitments, and availability of parts along with insights into how long it would take a technician to fix the problem with the support of augmented reality. The Centre illustrates how solutions and services offered are entirely scalable and can be tailored to businesses.

The experience centre also demonstrate how Rockwell Automation integrates solutions seamlessly from the plant floor up through the enterprise in collaboration with strategic alliance partners like PTC, Cisco, Microsoft, and Endress+Hauser to accelerate innovation and convergence for operational and information technologies through digital transformation.

Replying to a question over the rate of adoption of digitalization and automation in India to Indian Chemical News, Kakru said that Rockwell Automation has been operating in the automation space in India for about 40 years. “It's been growing in leaps and bounds. We have been seeing industry adopting automation for the last three decades. The gap is getting covered as new players have also started adopting automation. I think some of the smaller manufacturers like MSMEs are not so keen due to the capital constraint but most of the factories that we see are adopting it,” he said adding that this is the same for digital but a lot of that did not translate into actual execution. However, over the last five years, we've seen almost three-fold increase in terms of adopting digitalization and automation.

Elaborating further, he said that there's also a lot of communication in the market around automation and digitalization. “Most of the companies have CDOs, CISOs, CTOs, and CIOs who work around these initiatives. Some of the companies have even gone beyond. They're much stronger or faster than what we thought about them before. And, there are also people who are just adopting and understanding. So once people have a look at business applicability, they implement it,” he added.

Talking about the chemical industry, he opined that chemical is a much more distributed diverse field. There could be small players and issues are more related to how much investment they make. However, it is an evolving process. We see Indian chemical companies are growing faster and expanding out of India. Big players in chemicals are very much into automation and digitalization. New players take informed decisions and understand the benefit of digitalization and automation,” he said.

Compared to the chemical industry, oil and gas is much more progressive “Going three decades back, most of the oil and gas sector was dominated by PSUs. They had consultants and global technology suppliers. Some of the automation equipment that they have installed is world class. They were at par with the global standards,” he added.

In digital also, the oil and gas sector is really up and there it is very strong. They buy millions of dollars of digital products and solutions every year. On the chemical side, it is kind of in my view still to go but the space is changing fast.

Rockwell’s approach to The Connected Enterprise offers customers an end-to-end solution, using contemporary technologies from Rockwell & it’s with PartnerNetwork. The Center helps customers experience the opportunities of digitalization first-hand, so they can immediately begin developing tailored strategies together.