Rockwell Automation, Inc. (ROK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

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Thank you, Shannon. Okay. So welcome to the webinar. We're going to talk today about Asset Inventory Management and an application that we have to help you out with doing exactly that, right? So just kind of dive in here. Today, we're going to talk about an application called Asset Inventory Manager. And the idea here is to help with a variety of things. So we look at things like increasing productivity and uptime and being able to keep track of the assets they have and what are their life cycles, where are they installed, what revisions are things at in terms of things like firmware and that type of stuff. Being able to have that inventory and all that information easily to keep track of what elements are being used in your equipment, right? And so along with that, being able to help you reduce downtime and risk, right? So if I can go in and see, here's my inventory of I may have a number of controllers that I see current firmware is headed to be out of date or is out of date, right? Then I can take some planning time and do more of a planned proactive maintenance type approach rather than a reactive one. I can also do other things like enable business processes or integration with other systems, right, by taking advantage of alerts and things like that, that come out of -- changes in life cycle somebody swapped out a controller. Those types of things and being able to interact with other systems. So maybe I have to procure a new part or maybe I want to issue a work order so that somebody can go out and do a firmware upgrade or something like that, for example. Right? And the idea here is to help improve your productivity overall, right, by giving you this breadth of information at your fingertips so that you could make better decisions around how you manage the assets they have. And so this application is designed to give you that kind of centralized up-to-date view of all this type of data, right? And so what are the kinds of things that this application and the capability brings to the table. We can pick up both automated and manual list of your installed base, right? So what does that include? It tells me what the devices are. It tells me what firmware level they're at. I get links to release note or product notices. I can identify when items are approaching a discontinuation date or whether in the current life cycle for a firmware, I can track changes. So if I can see not only what their current firmware is, but I might also see who has edited the program, when did they check it out, when did they check it back in, what did they change, right? So I also have information around both hardware changes and what's loaded in the hardware as well. And I can get an inventory of what activations I'm using. So utilizing information from our activation manager, activation server tool as well. And then as I mentioned, the platform that this application is built on gives you the ability to start to do some of these other things as well, right? So if I want to connect up to my ERP or CMMS system, I want to do some workflows for either alerting or those kinds of integrations, I have the ability within this platform to do that. So as we look at just kind of a high-level architecture, right? Essentially, this application is designed to be the single pane of glass view across a variety of data sets, right? So I can have information coming in from automated agents through something like AssetCentre, I might have a manual inventory file that I want to bring in. I connect up, I guess, on the life cycle information off the web, and then bring all that information together into this overall view, where I can now look across multiple sites and bring that information in across all these different sites and look at it in a consolidated way. So just a couple -- we've got to have a couple of quick polling questions as we go throughout today's webinar. So just a quick one here, if you guys could give us a little bit of feedback here on how you're tracking your life cycle information on your control assets. What types of things are you doing today? Is it manual, something custom, some sort of mix? Just kind of curious to see kind of where people are at. We'll give everybody a few seconds here to make their selections. [Voting]

We will move on and take a look at how we're looking. So this is interesting. It's kind of an evenish mix across the board. So the idea here behind this application is to help bridge those gaps of, I have some manual data, I might have some software, I might have a mix. If I have no system, I would need to look at what types of systems may I want to put in to feed an application like this in an automatic way. You could feed in information manually if you will. But this is interesting that there's that kind of mix across the board in terms of the different options. And so what kind of things are we trying to do here with the goals of this application, right? And so what we're trying to help reduce is that time-consuming manual process of going out, counting things, determining what -- logging, what their firmware is going and then entering all that in somewhere especially for -- if I have a lot of sites that I need to keep track of, right. The other things are, if I might have assets that aren't connected, but I want to be included. I need to have the ability to incorporate those in the system and also covering multiple brands. So it's not just Rockwell stuff, people have a lot of different types of devices on their network. So can we pick up information across different brands and types of assets as well. And having this information at our fingertips also helps us determine that we have the right number of spare parts where we need them. So if we can understand where we're using certain devices, where we need to have some of those in stock. This application could help you do that as well as maintaining your hardware standards across the different sites. And as I mentioned before, helping to manage your processes for upgrades, patching, those types of things. And so one of the basic functions that this application does is provide an automated installed base report, right? So if you have AssetCentre running, this will pick up whatever AssetCentre finds and incorporate that into the application. So if I've got AssetCentre under running in 3 or 4, 5 sites, this application will reach out to those and bring that information in and put it together in this kind of single pane and glass view. So that I can see either on a per-site type view or across the enterprise type view, what assets are there, what is the firmware information for those assets, and what's its life cycle and also give us links to things like release nodes, product notices or product service advisories and also give us information around the discontinuation date and a recommended replacement product as well, right? So there's different -- some different reports in here that show you all of that information. Other things that we can keep track of in terms of the life cycle information and the data around it is that we can look at just kind of a summary of the ones that we really should pay attention to in terms of discontinued or active mature. But we can also keep track of architecture changes. So somebody might swap something out, and we see a device with a new serial number come in. At the same location, we had another device. So we can identify where things -- where changes are happening. In addition to that, we can bring in off-line files. So not all assets are connected, and what we can do is bring in configuration files from something like AssetCentre and from those files, we can incorporate the information such as catalog numbers series, firmware, all that relevant information and bring that into the application as well. So coming back to another polling question. Just a quick one here. Yes or no if people are using AssetCentre today? Okay. Give a few more seconds here just to -- people have chance to respond. [Voting]

So we have some AssetCentre users out there. We have -- looks like we have some folks we need to talk to you about using AssetCentre. But essentially, this is a really excellent layer on top of if I have AssetCentre running in multiple locations and the automated agents running and those kinds of things. This is an excellent tool to layer on top of that to get that kind of overall view of the assets that AssetCentre is keeping track of. We should be seeing stock information. So another thing that we keep track of as well in here is our inventory, right? So we can connect in and load in what pieces we have in inventory. We can look at them by what their product code is. We can identify where they are, so which location they're at. And we can identify how many do we have, right? So this is a way to incorporate our spare part inventory into the application as well, right? So we can see what we have deployed and what we're using and we can also see what we have in our stock as well for replacement pieces. And then from an AssetCentre perspective or an audit perspective, this is where some of the other features of AssetCentre come into play, right, in terms of being able to not only keep track of what devices I have and what's their firmware and all that stuff. But also what programs are in the controllers? Who is changing what? So if somebody logs in and they make a change and then they sign out, basically, this is keeping track of all those changes, right? And we can identify when they changed it, what they changed and it keeps a full audit trail of that. But that also allows us to restrict as well or lock down access to being able to go and make those kinds of changes, right? So maybe we want to keep that ability to lock down in just certain teams or individuals, right? And so all that information is also logged and available to us in this application as well. And then from an activation management standpoint, I can go in and say, here's a serial number show me where this activation is being used, right? And I can identify who used it from which device in a date and time of when they were using it, right? So another kind of window into overall view of the software assets as well in terms of when activations are being utilized. Right, I'm going to skip to this one. And as I mentioned earlier, this application is built on top of ThingWorx, if you're familiar with ThingWorx. And that platform gives us the tools and ability to incorporate other things, right? So this is a good kind of first step into the ThingWorx world for those that have not used that platform. So it's a nice add-on layer for AssetCentre customers or a good kind of starter application for people [Audio Gap] get going with ThingWorx. The ThingWorx gives us those tools where if I want to do things like connect into an ERP system and have automatic ordering for replacement partner, right? Or I want to create a work order in a CMMS system, or I want to have some sort of a workflow that says, "Hey, I want you to alert me when I get one of these product advisories or service advisory or something like that." So this application is a good starter but then it can grow with you as well, right, in terms of, I want to be able to utilize this with other things, right, in terms of the solution growing from where it started. And so we see here we've got a variety of types of data sources. So I mentioned our AssetCentre is a big one in terms of our inventory files and our offline files as well as audit information. Clarity is another. Our Clarity security service is another one in terms of finding additional assets and identifying risks. Those scans also detect and Historian and Asset Framework can also be information that we could potentially bring in as well, right? So -- and these are just kind of the starter data sources. Like I said, if you want to start to integrate with other things, that's certainly possible as well. So at this point, I'm going to jump to a short demo. We'll just kind of walk through some of the screens and give you a sense of what the application looks like. And then at the end, we'll have some time for some Q&A as well. Okay. So this is the just kind of landing screen. And what we see here, the idea, like I said, behind this app is to provide that kind of single pane and glass view of all the different types of information that we were talking about in the slides, right? And so this gives me just kind of a quick hit view of major life cycle items or minor ones. So you see we've got some firmware issues going on here between discontinued and retired. We have some outdated firmware. So some other things that we need to probably be taking a look at as well as either an installed base breakdown or a simple breakdown of not Rockwell, non-Rockwell stuff. How many files we're using in terms of from AssetCenter, just off-line files, how many activations we're currently using. So this sense of information. Right now, I'm looking at all sites. In this particular demo, I've got some information for Houston. Having wired up, say one, but you get the sense of, okay, this would be -- I could have tabs all across the tab for however many sites I wire up to send information into this application. And so we see here just kind of some 3 kind of key tiles here in terms of information. And it gives me a breakdown here of firmware or life cycle status by these different categories as well as an installed base so we get to see here kind of a breakdown of our top items that we have installed, top network types that we're utilizing. In this case, any of our hardware changes. So essentially, this is demo right? We loaded up the demo system initially. So we had kind of a big jump here in terms of we added a bunch of devices into the system. But as we -- as the system is utilized, we would start to see a breakdown here of we added or replaced different pieces of hardware and you would be able to break that down by which site it was. We have an indicator here of any updates from our source files, right, or any of our inventory or other files that we're using. So if we get some updates that come in, where there are agents that are set up to run and bring information into this application. And so we can get a sense of how many updates that we've had recently. So one thing we can do here is just kind of click in and drill into a particular category, and we can see here, we've got -- we're looking at a particular category of firmware life cycle, which is retired. And we see here, we've got listed device names, descriptions, what the source is. So this is from one of our AssetCentre files. We see the IP address, right? So we can tell where it is. We also get links to the different either release notes or safety advisory. These things like that, right -- right there for each of the different items that we see, right? So if we're looking at something like a -- one of these Logix Controllers, I might get product notice or release notes here. Some have [Audio Gap] available, but you get a sense of -- I can get all this information just from that one chart, right? And so that's just a quick simple example of a drill down from there into something that obviously we want to take a look at. But as you see here down the left-hand side, there's a lot of other -- a lot of other items here. So I'm just going to kind of quickly walk through some of these various reports and visualizations. So this is just an overall inventory of what we've got. Just one big list. I can come in and start to imply some filters. So I might just say I want to look at filter for a product type. I want to look for a programmable controller. So I might come in and say show me the ones that meet that filter. And you see here for the product types, I'm looking at my PLCs. Here is all the different PLCs that we have in the system. And I can see here quickly, I've got some of these are good. Here's one that's active and mature. Here's one that's discontinued. So I can immediately start to see the different types of devices that I have, where it's installed, what revision it's currently sitting at. And so all this key information in terms of -- about that device, right? And we see where the firmware is, we see where the firmware is, we see where the [ max ] revision could be, [ min ] revision could be, right? So the idea here is to bring all of this information just right at your fingertips. And there's a variety of ways to go through your inventory and just kind of get a different sense of your inventory information. So a simple breakdown in terms of which vendor, how many other devices do you have, we come in and look at it by device name, right? And so we can start to kind of break it down here in terms of the different devices that are in use. You see here, we've picked up actually some VMware images as well that are running on some control stuff. So you see there's quite a variety of way to look at this information, right? So we can see here while it looks like we've got quite a few of these Logix controllers in the inventory. You can also take a look at your life cycle status. And if I just come in here and pick one. I mean one here -- so if I come in and select something that I'm interested in. I can also see down here all of the various firmware revisions and there's life cycle and information about that, a link to information about that. And we see here that for this particular product, we're seeing firmware is for Series A, Series Bs, right? So all of this information about this particular device is listed here. So if I need to go take a look at information about a particular firmware revision or see what it's status is, I can get that through this interface. So this is an example of bringing in some of the scan files from AssetCentre. And I can page through these things and take a look at all the different devices and things that were found. I can come in here and click on something and get information about what it is, right? It's a PLC-5, it's got this IP address, right? And I can identify where something is installed. So in this case, I get a full path here to where something is installed as well as the life cycle information about it, right? So this is also helpful in terms of knowing where to go, find these devices, right, when they do need to be maintained. In addition to that, we can incorporate our Clarity scans as well. So finding network devices. We see things such as VMware machines here, other third-party controllers, those kinds of things, Clarity will pick those up and we can move -- pull it from whatever information we can get from those scans and bring those into this tool as well. So I mentioned in the slides, we talked about life cycle and we talked about replacement information as well. And so we see here just kind of a quick view of I'm looking at -- I've got a controller here. It gives me the recommended replacement product. It's a functional replacement. We can see information about the various series and firmware revisions and release notes for the item that I need to replace. So again, putting all this information right there for you in these various dashboards and reports. We can also keep track of duplicates. So sometimes, we might have redundant controllers or sometimes we might double -- pick up a device both through AssetCentre and maybe Clarity might pick it up or somebody might have couple of different names for the same device, so we might pick it up twice. This is a way to identify or help identify where we're seeing -- if we're duplicates in our scans, this is a way to help identify those and clean up that duplicate information. So as far as changes go, so we can keep track of changes in the system, so I'll take -- just pick a date range here to get started. So we see here, these are changes in our inventory file for each device that's in the system. So right now, we only have 1 file revision in here, but as the system grows and is used, right, we would see those file revisions grow. So right now, it's not a ton of information in this particular view, but it gives you a sense of we can keep track of how many files we're using and the inventory numbers within those. From an audit perspective, in terms of like AssetCentre audit, again, I can come in, just pick a date range here. I'll pick a few -- pick some known dates here. And I can select. You see here, I have the ability to look at a variety of sources, right? So I can look at Activation, AssetCentre, Security, Emulate right? So I'm just going to pick everything for right now and take a look at the information. So I see here, I can see very quickly when applications were used, who was using them, I see somebody checked out a file here, right? I have -- somebody has started up emulate, right ? Users have logged in, logged out, right? So I can get a sense of everything that's going on with a particular device or program as well. And I can also look at -- if I have my hierarchy setup inside AssetCentre and I bring that in. I can look down through my tree here and let's say I want to look at what's going on with this particular ACD file. I can go and see all the different revisions of this file, right? When it was checked out, when it was checked in, what comments were made, date and time, who was the user, right? So all of that information around what was done is also available here. So, right, we get not only the inventory assets and where they are in their life cycle and everything. We also bring in what's in those assets and what's going on with the programs that are in those assets. As I mentioned, we also can pick up activation information from our activation server, right? And so again, I can just kind of pick some dates here and take a look -- try that again. Here we go. Right, so we can take a look here. I have beginning of a serial number and it will show me when it was checked out, what -- the date and time that it was checked out, which machine it was checked out on, et cetera. So that's kind of just a quick overview of the application itself and the features that it brings. Again, like I said, this is geared to be the kind of first step into IoT platform and the ThingWorx world as well. So this is a tool that you can use to get started. It can be tailored and customized to fit your need or the way you want to feed information to it. And I think we've got enough time here to do some Q&A as well. So we're going to bring on my coworker, Salma, as well to help handle Q&A.

Hey, Matt. All right, we got a lot of really great questions. So first, what's the difference between this and AssetCentre?

So I can take this one. So typically, AssetCentre is at a site level deployment, right? Most of the time, people will deploy it at a site. What this is designed to do is provide that corporate or enterprise level view across multiple instances of an AssetCentre system, right? So the idea is to bring in information from multiple of those into just that 1 view.

Perfect. Is this license-based?

So it is licensed for ThingWorx. So there is a ThingWorx license and user licenses that are part of the solution.

Okay. What type of searches are allowed, SNMP, CIP, WMI, et cetera, any additional?

Salma, do you know the answer on that one?

Okay. Yes, I'll take that one. Just to be clear. So what that was showing you today was really our asset inventory manager, ThingWorx-based application which as he said is designed to really sit on top of your plan based on the AssetCentre service to give you the enterprise view. All the capabilities and the functionality that he was showing is really being AssetCentre. So when we talk -- when we're asking questions like what kind of searches are allowed. It's really what you can do with the AssetCentre product, which in itself is using RSLinx so it's really down to what capabilities are available down there on the data service side of it. So in terms of the answer to the specific question like SNMP, WMI, I'm not so sure still absolutely. So it's really more of a question not so much for this Asset Inventory Management, more of AssetCentre. So we don't know exactly. We can find out and give you the answer after the webinar.

Yes, because I think the other piece, right, could be a Clarity scan. And I think we would want to look at what other searches can be done using Clarity as well because it might have that capability. I'm not super versed in Clarity, right? So we could take a look at that and figure that out, yes.

Excellent point, Matt. Yes.

Great. Thank you. Well, this solution key track of controller program changes for older Allen-Bradley controllers, such as SLC family controllers?

Absolutely. So again, leveraging the AssetCentre product, my understanding. And Matt, correct me if I've got this wrong, is we support all of the Rockwell hardware in that software -- in that product.

And for a long time, yes. That would be like the example that we saw in the demo right where you see the check-in, checkout. They would -- AssetCentre would pick that up for the [ SLCs ] too.

Perfect. And this question is kind of along the same lines about processors using RS Logix, 11, 15 and 16. Will it still read this information?

As far as I know, yes.

Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely. Great. Can I add non-Rockwell assets, PLCs, windows hosts, et cetera, manually?

You might be able to with an off-line inventory file. We have had some customizations done to where people can enter -- mainly entering assets into the system as well I've seen a couple of implementations where we've taken the out-of-the-box product and added some data entry screens for people to plug in if they want to manually enter their own assets, they could do that, too. So we might have some ability using an off-line file. Certainly, you could extend the application to do that, too.

Great. Can I use this tool to pull all my AssetCentre system and provide an enterprise-level asset inventory?

Yes, that's the point of the tool actually, Yes. So if I had 5, 6, 7 sites running AssetCentre, this would provide that overall enterprise-wide view across all those systems.

Perfect. Regarding security, what can AssetCentre do more than Windows authenticators -- Authentication, I'm sorry?

I'm going to assume that, that question maybe came in before Matt went through the demo because I think it should be quite apparent how it differs from just -- it's not just an authentication application. It does a lot more than managing authentication. It gives you that whole ability to have that visibility across all of your devices, all the great stuff that we've been talking about in the webinar. So if you do have like a follow-up question, please populate in the Q&A. But I think we probably addressed that one.

Okay. Yes, Shane, if you have any follow-up questions to that, please just add that in the chat. Next question. Will ThingWorx Asset Manager also track our corporate IT infrastructure or just our industrial devices?

So I think from the Clarity security service perspective, scanning the network for non-automation devices is really the point of that service, right? And so we could bring that information in, but you would need to be using that Clarity security service scan as well, right? So that's a different offering from us that users can subscribe to and then we would take the results of that and bring that into Asset Inventory Managers. So we do have the capability if you're using the appropriate tool. I guess, would be the right answer for that.

Okay. To make sure I'm not missing anybody. So does a site without AssetCentre require an agent to exist to provide information back to the inventory manager? Is that a hardware device or software.

Right now, the agents are just software.

So we'll just expand on that one, Matt. My understanding is that this application, so the functionality you showed today I don't repeat myself, this is based on looking at an AssetCentre service. So it's not really going directly to an agent is looking at the AssetCentre server itself, which is being fed in by the agents. So if you don't have AssetCentre on the site, then that would be the first step to get this application up and running.

Yes.

Are you able to install this application if you already have an AssetCentre license and a ThingWorx license at a site?

If you have the appropriate ThingWorx license, then yes, you could.

Okay.

You got to have the right license to be able to view that, right? So this is ThingWorx sanction, right? So do you have like the ThingWorx platform premium, for example, right? That gives you the ability to add additional apps to your ThingWorx implementation, right? So that's really kind of point of it is, do I have the right ThingWorx license that I can add additional applications to that instance. And if so, yes, we would take this solution and you could buy Inventory Manager and install it on to your existing ThingWorx, right?