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

Hello, everyone. I'm Allen Grant. I'm a Commercial Marketing Manager here at Rockwell Automation, and I will be serving as the moderator for today's webinar, and I want to thank you all for joining the webinar. Before we get started, we have a few housekeeping items. [Operator Instructions] Today's event will be recorded and will be available right after it's completed. And you can access the recording using the same link you used to access today's live event. After the webinar, we will also be sending you an e-mail with the resources from today's event, including any slides and handouts and the link to the recording. Additionally, information regarding today's topic can be found in the handout panel on the webinar platform. With that, I'd like to welcome you again to the webinar, which is titled, HMI Platform Risk Reduction Considerations and Justin and Al are your speakers today. I'll go over the agenda real quick here. Here's today's agenda; we'll go over the introductions, do technical risks -- schedules and technical risk and clearly schedule risk, commercial risks, conclusions, and then we'll have a Q&A section at the end. With that, I would like to hand this over to Justin, who will go on with the webinar.

Good day, everybody. I'm Justin Garski. I'm the OEM segment manager for packaging and converting print web here in North America, been doing machinery and industrial automation for around 25 years now. And joining with me today is Al. I'll let Al introduce himself here.

Good morning. I'm Al Letourneau. My current job title is Senior Commercial Portfolio Manager, which is kind of a mouthful. I'm actually the marketing manager for human machine interface hardware and worked for Allen-Bradley and then Rockwell for actually for 40 years as of a couple of weeks ago. So along the lines of the introduction for today's material, we're going to be focused on the benefits -- the business benefits, specifically that are delivered to OEMs and SIs. End user people could benefit from a lot of these messages too, because whereas the OEMs and SIs pretty much have a product project-centric approach to doing their work. End users work closely with them and also run projects to their own. So some of the items that we talked about today really kind of bleed over into the end user space as well. Looking at managing risks, and that's really kind of the whole point of this presentation, it can really increase the likelihood that it's all going to work out the way you want. When you start on a project like this, there's 1 million ways that it could go and there's a few specific ways that you want it to go. And so increasing your efficiency, increasing the certainty of your outcomes really can contribute to your profitability as well, and a lot of that really centers around collaboration. We're going to be talking about collaboration not only within the organizations of the system integrators and OEMs, but also collaboration with the end users because looking at this holistic life cycle of a project, it really starts off with a quotation process and RFQ process and kind of an interaction that takes place early in the project life cycle. It flows through that product life cycle and in the end after the project has been delivered, of course, there's the ongoing support. So looking at all of that holistically, I think, it's really key to understanding how you can best manage those risks throughout that sequence. So we're going to be talking a lot today about a new HMI platform that we've recently introduced, known as FactoryTalk Optix. And as we focus on that, really the reason that we're focusing on it is because it's new and because it's different and really presents us with a whole lot of opportunities relative to new practices, even potentially new business models for both, OEMs and integrators, and how they interact with their customers on an ongoing basis. That's not to say that our previous products that have been around for quite a while now, the FactoryTalk View products, for example, the [indiscernible] products. It's not to say that those are being replaced or that they're on the way out, just that they're very familiar to a lot of our audiences and so we wanted to focus for today on the new incremental functions that you get out of FactoryTalk Optix. So having said that, we have a few survey questions for you, and we're going to start with the one that you see up on the screen. It's helpful for us to know as we get into this and we talk about FactoryTalk's Optix, how much you've heard about it, how much familiarity that you might have with it. So go ahead and take a little time to check one of those boxes, watch the stats and see what the level of interest, level of familiarity is with the FactoryTalk's Optix products, and that will help inform our remarks as we go through the presentation. And it looks like the majority of people have heard about it. So that's interesting, given that it's relatively new, it's actually great to see that a lot of people have already heard about this exciting new platform. So with that, I'm going to hand it back to Justin. And Justin, do you want to take us to the next slide?

Can do here. So we'll lock in those results, and then we'll move along. So thinking about technical risk and what it takes to develop a machine and we talk about speed of development. So what I've ran into and what I've noticed is, over time, a lot of HMIs have been just kind of continually built on what was there before, right? So it's never -- oftentimes, it's not a clean slate. And you kind of get these things that live on in legacy with that system forever, whether they really belong there or not. So when we think about kind of the speed of development, we've got this idea of starting from scrap. So when you open up the new environment, right, it's really, really solid. It's got a lot of really neat features, and we won't be able to get into all of that today. But one of the things I think is really interesting is this ability to use scripting to do object generation, right? So you can write some code to help you automate the build of your visualization tool, right? So instead of having to manually copy and paste and link things and do all of this work, if you understand how the tool works and we are here to help you do that, you're able to use these tools to kind of automate the process, right, and take some of that workload off of you. Beyond that, there are better tools within this product that allow you to create these objects and reuse things that you've done from previous applications. So you're not stock right, you're not constantly doing a copy/paste, start from where you were last time, you were able to put these things in buckets and bring them in. So I think it's a really neat way to tie in things that you've done before, create things that truly are unique to your organization and your processes. And in turn, once you've got that upfront investment, it should reduce that overall speed or time to development and the cost and risk associated with it. So Al, any other thoughts on that one?

Yes. I guess a few things. One of them is that I actually saw a demonstration recently at FactoryTalk Optix has applied to a stone polishing application where they have these polishing machines that had hundreds of individual polishing heads that would engage the service of Marble like making a countertop, for example, or making architectural services. And it's an example of where each one of those individual polishing heads was essentially a software object, which once they had one of those polishing heads completed, they could basically stamp it out hundreds of times and not have to go back through and at each copy, but actually iterate those in software using C-sharp scripting such that they could essentially create one master object and then invoke it over and over again and really cut down the programming time associated with that function. And I think what we're seeing there is methodologies from the coding world starting to make their way over into the industrial IoT space. For a long time, those have been separate from one another in ways that I think were somewhat suboptimal, maybe even a little unfortunate, but we're really starting to see those sorts of methodologies, those sorts of thought processes and business practices start to move into the industrial IoT space. In a way, it really helps manage technical risk. For example, GitHub integration. For those of you who have done a lot of work in high-level languages like C and C#, you might be familiar with GitHub repositories where you can have multiple people working simultaneously on a project. They'll check out a version of it, they'll work on it. You'll have complete version control that shows who has changed what, when. That way, you can really keep track of who's working on what parts of the project. You can easily pull in modules of code from previous projects that you might have done. And it really gives you the ability to build and own intellectual property that you as an integrator or you as an OEM can reuse over and over again. It could be that there are cases where your customers have already seen some of these software modules where they're familiar with them. If you use those in this sort of a context, you'll have more people looking at the project, earlier in the project. And by doing that, you're going to catch problems and eliminate these sorts of red control issues that you might have where you have two people working on the same thing at the same time, then they've got to go back in and recombine the edits and then try to resynchronize the work. It really has a tendency to increase the efficiency and decrease the amount of time required to not only do your initial programming, but actually troubleshoot and fix any bugs that might arise. Any thoughts on that, Justin?

Yes. I just -- I think back to when I started writing software and at the time, it was Visual SourceSafe was the tool of choice, right? And so there was no collaboration, you can check in and check out and it was kind of where it all started, but it's encouraging to see where these tools are migrating to kind of exciting to see how it should make your job as a developer that much easier, right? Kind of bleeding right into some of the other technical risk and making things easier. This would have been an interesting polling question that I'm thinking about it now, but how many people have had to go in and manually rescale graphics on a visualization platform over the last 20 years, right? Everyone on this call, I would assume. And what we're excited about and what we're proud to say is not only is Optix based on HTML5 and includes functionality like scalable vector graphics, it also has the ability to resize and kind of re-lay out the objects that are on the screen, right? So if you think about historically HMI, if you had a [indiscernible] zoom functionality, everything kind of stayed in relationship to where it was on the screen. With the new tools and Optix, you can actually pick and choose much like you would between a web interface going from a desktop to a mobile phone, right? You're able to define what those characteristics are and whether or not it moves or just rescales or resizes or maybe it goes from landscape to horizontal. So a lot of neat functionality that's built in there with the graphics, super powerful, right? And kind of in that same light, Optix is able to run on a panel or in a web browser or on a PC, right? So you'll have a reason and a need for being able to do those sorts of rescaling events on the fly pretty regularly. So I think it should make it easier for building that intuitive experience as you and your users desire. So Al?

Yes. And I think it's interesting to think of this not as a monolithic HMI application, where all of the pieces and parts are all together in a kind of an inseparable block of code. This is really a much more component-centric situation. And as you can see here, the ability to run the presentation engine on one platform and then reflect that browser on some kind of a tablet or other mobile device reflected in a browser on a remote PC anywhere else in the world. It really goes to show you how this is a very component-centric system where you can have a lot more architectural flexibility with it. That really helps control your schedule risk in addition to your technology risk, because you get a lot more agility in terms of how you design systems. And one element of that agility is what sort of hardware that you're going to eventually deploy this to. Now clearly, in a case where you need an open platform, let's say, for example, you're doing a packaging machine that has some kind of vision inspection and/or a small assembly machine. For example, yesterday, I was in our eighth floor contactor area in Milwaukee, where I work, and they build these little contactors and they do vision inspection on these contactors. And so in a case like that, you might have a third-party hardware forward that has to go into this platform in the PC -- PCI card or whatever. In those cases, you need an open platform. You might have various pieces of software that are associated with that, that really our most comfortably run in a Windows environment or potentially Linux. And in a case where you need an open platform, the industrial PC like the ASEM 6300 industrial PCs from Rockwell Automation are a great fit. But in a case where you really don't need that, you can scale it down, especially for smaller applications into a dedicated hardware clients like the new OptixPanel terminals. I was at the PACK EXPO show last, whenever it was, would have been spring, I guess. And so a lot of penalties for one thing because those are well accepted in that market. But a lot of very small industrialized HMI terminals, some of those as small as 4 inches across. And so in a case like that where you have maybe a little shrink [indiscernible] or something like that, that doesn't have a lot of sophistication associated whether you got a few buttons, maybe a little graph that you want to show of a temperature or something like that, you could put those into a scale down HMI appliance. You can get something that's a very small physical packet size. You can drive a lot of the cost out of that, get yourself more competitive in the bargain. And in a case like that, for example, maybe you're an OEM that makes small machinery. You've got some customers that are based here in North America that are standardized on Rockwell, maybe you've got customers in Asia or in Europe that standardize on other brands. With FactoryTalk Optix and OptixPanels, we have native drivers for pretty much any brand of controller out there. So you can enforce a standard on the HMI side even in the case where our customer is asking for a different controller. Furthermore, in terms of the architectural aspects of this, you can use a component-centric model for your development as well using OPC UA for different software modules to communicate with one another inside the box. Or if you like, you can use MQTT to send information to the cloud. Now MQTT has been big as a telemetry interface in places like oil and gas for a long time, maybe, wastewater, but we're starting to also see it in the heavy industrial space, like, for example, in machinery that might go into a food plant or something like that. And the reason is that it's a good way for those machines to really use a kind of an IoT mindset to send information up to remote servers, maybe at the corporate location, maybe even an OEM. So the OEM can -- or the integrator can keep track of what's going on with that system and provide a higher level of support. So looking at these various architectural options, it really allows you to connect what you want, where you want, when you want, it really gives you a much greater level of flexibility than you might have had in the past.

Yes. And on that architecture option, one of the questions that just came in through the chat here is how does this integrate with ThinManager, right? And I think from that standpoint, you've got the flexibility just like you do with View today, you can run that on a central piece of hardware, and you can view it remotely. If you want to just put it on a PC and then run that app natively on a tablet or on a thin PC, all that's possible, right? So there's no real limitations or differences in how you need to address it. You just may not have to address it the same way. So I think those flexibility in that architecture and hardware and software really is an interesting manage of the system. One of the big things that I take for granted a lot of times here in North America, especially is working with distribution, right? So when we talk about things like mean time to repair, mean time for failure, Rockwell and Allen-Bradley have a history of building a really, really solid products, at least that's my impression. That's my hope as to what your impression is. So we think that you've got a good partner in us in building that reliable hardware but when things go bump in the night or when you need support or training, you're not having to rely solely on our technical resources, right? So when we think about schedule, one of the big things that we stress a lot is making sure you've got that relationship with your distributor, they can bring stock into inventory, they'll handle all of your commercial agreements and help with warranty claims in the event something does go wrong. So I think in this whole value chain of visualization and really Rockwell and Allen-Bradley in general, it's super important to use these folks. And really, it's a global network. So you're not having to worry about if you're based in Boston, your machine is in Los Angeles and something goes wrong, you're not having to FedEx it overnight, right? They can probably call up who is local in the APR where that machine is and probably get something sooner than that. So we just wanted to highlight that and bring that to the attention here today.

Thanks. And to my way of thinking, as we move from technical risk into schedule risk, if you do have a thing going bump in the night, as you say, Justin, it is nice to have someone who's local that can come over and help you. It's -- especially in North America and increasingly in other parts of the world, too, the distribution channel is a huge value because even though they are independent companies, independent from one another, in a lot of cases, they are large chains. Some of them in the U.S., for example, are owned by French parent companies or vice versa. You have American companies that have expanded into Europe. And so even though they are independent companies, they work as large chains in a lot of cases, and they also work closely with one another or they work closely with your end users. So it is great to have that layer of support from our authorized distributor channel, and it is a truly global network. And that really allows you to control your technical risk because if you do have a bump -- I'm going to reuse that, by the way, I hope I don't have to pay you royalties, I like that one. But in any case, if you do have the unexpected situation, maybe, for example, there was just a miscommunication between you and the end user where they just say, oh, no, we want it over here or we want to work like this, we want to know -- we thought there was going to be a second panel over here, whatever. That gives you the ability to kind of think on your feet and adapt with the help of that authorized distributor. So it really can help you manage not only your technical and schedule risk, but your commercial risk as well coming out of this project that you're working on with a good bottom line. And speaking of which, one way to get competitive is to find a way to cost down your equipment, your system, your machine, whatever it might be. And one way to cost that down is to again take a look at those alternatives to an industrial PC in the case where you don't need an open platform. So the OptixPanels go up to a 21.5-inch diagonal size. They look essentially the same as a PC because, in fact, the front face of those is the identical hardware components to what we use when we build the ASEM 6300-panel PC. So if you have one of those modeled in a panel, you can't tell what it is, if it's a PC or if it's not, because they look literally identical because the exposed components are, in fact, the same. But by deploying a product like that, you really get a lot of additional advantages because for one thing, there's no exposed to operating system. It's a sealed appliance. It just is an HMI. It's not an open PC. It has no start button. It has no need for antivirus software. It's basically a sealed appliance with no exposed operating system, and it's sold that way, it's a lot easier to administer and maintain. And by the way, we at Rockwell are very, very big, especially in recent years on IT/OT integration. But in the case where you're deploying to a device that's not an IT connected device. It's basically an appliance parked on the local real-time control Ethernet network, there's really no need to involve IT either. So that makes it just simpler to work organizationally and technically as well. So you get what's essentially the same type of user experience even if you deployed it to a PC, but you really get a lower-cost product that can be physically smaller and it's easier to manage and maintain.

Yes. And I think it's -- it's kind of the same proposition we have with View and PanelView, right, Al? I mean it's -- you can kind of scale it a little bit, but I think Optix gives you another level of flexibility and customization. So I think that's encouraging for sure.

Yes. And that's a good point is that if you look at our previously existing products, which, of course, we continue to invest in, we continue to evolve, and you're going to see increasing levels of value delivered from those as we continue to evolve in the future, you see an analogous kind of an architectural story where with PanelView Plus 7 product, for example, you can run FactoryTalk View Machine Edition on that. And then if you need to deploy that to a larger system, an open platform, you can run that same FT View ME software on a PC or you can move up to the Site Edition to have a distributed system. You can actually build something that resembles a real distributed control system like you might see from some of the legacy DCS vendors. So you really got a lot of scalability. And you have that same type of scalability in the Optix world as well. It's just a different set of modules deployed at different levels of scale.

For sure. And thinking about, Al, different modules in sale, right? One of the things that excites me a lot about the way Optix comes to market, is this around -- this idea around using and deploying the pieces you need and not necessarily everything that comes with it, right? So it's an interesting licensing model that we're looking at here and that we've deployed. And it's more around picking the number of features you want and not necessarily picking a suite of features that Rockwell Automation has decided what belongs there, right? So when you think about things that are out there, it might be data logging, it might be connecting to third-party controllers that might be using it as a web host, right, and being able to hit it from your tablet. Each one of those things is a feature. And so what the with the panel, the hardware appliance, you can get that in an 8 feature or an 11 feature version, both of which can be upgraded. So if you get through -- part way through a product who I forgot something, you're able to upgrade those later. And you don't have to worry about that when you order, right? So when you think about ordering some of, I guess, I'd say, a hardened appliance that has a feature set built into it, you kind of have to know that, right? Like if you're going to order a tower monitor, we offer different levels of that tower monitor. You need to know exactly what you're ordering at the time you click the button to say, send my [indiscernible] PO over. With Optix, you're going to get some of that flexibility to kind of do what you want and when you want, right? So I know there's probably some questions and concerns around, "hey, how do I calculate what these things look like, and is it super complicated." And as a former controls guy, now a sales guy and PowerPoint guy, I look through it, and it really makes sense, right? It's a nice clean list of features and options. It's not a huge undertaking to figure out what you're going to be using and requiring. And the whole idea of around on the appliance and making it fit for people like OEMs and system integrators, there's not much out there that you're going to go beyond that, in my opinion, that 11 token or 11 option usage. So I really think we've got some clever scaling here, and I think it's going to allow you to get a cost-effective option for your problems. So, Al, thought on that one?

Yes. Well, just for the audience here, Justin and I, we were prepared for this. We were trying to think of an analogy to explain how this works. And I'm old enough to remember that when my parents used to buy automobiles back in the 1960s, they could custom order a 73 Plymouth Fury wagon, for example. And my dad being very budget-minded individual ordered one without a clock. He ordered one without an electric clock, because it was all the clock that was run. So he had this blank space where the clock was normally. Well, in more recent years, you can get the LX version, you get the EX version. They all come with a standard package of options. You just buy it off a lot, "hey, you want the LX or the EX" because you're -- you want the leather seats with the heaters you're getting the EX and that's how much it costs. And you can't get the EX but not get the navigation, for example. Well, this is even better than that because with this, if you would say that you bought cars -- you're a rental car company, you buy them all the time, you buy them [indiscernible], you can basically buy the vehicle and then you can figure out what options that vehicle has after it's on your lot. So if you're doing a project with Optix, you can basically buy licenses when you need them during that development cycle. And then on the fly, after you bought them, you could decide which specific components you want to deploy. And because those components are selectively deployed by you when you want them deployed, you don't have to deploy anything or even license anything, that you're not going to use. And so that way, the size and the power required for that application can be reduced. You can run it on a lighter weight piece of hardware, like an OptixPanel, for example, to get better performance. And really, it puts you in control -- direct control over what specific components you want to license, what you want to deploy and what type of device you want to deploy it to. So moving into the commercial risk space here or moving further into what I could say. As an integrator or as an OEM, you get these RFQs, you have end users that you have relationships with. They are expanding their operation. And they come to you and say, we want to buy 3 machines like this or 1 of these and 1 of these and 1 of these. And you get the opportunity to quote against your competitors to try to take that business. And of course, doing a quotation, even looking at the RFQ in a lot of cases, can be a time-consuming process. You're going to want to know in advance before you accept that request and start to put together a proposal for it that you have a pretty good chance of getting the business. And your ability to take that business really hinges on a few things: your ability to bring in a really cost-effective solution that's known to be solid, you have an ongoing relationship with the customer where they might have seen some of this done business with them before, maybe they're asking for another machine that's just like the other one, only different because even -- every time they say it's just like the other one, it's always only different. At least you can leverage a lot of the work that you've done previously, and you can leverage that relationship that you might have or you can go in and say, look, we've got a lot of proprietary technology we've delivered in recent years and here's the benefits to you. In any case, it's a different kind of competitive landscape than you might be used to, having the ability to leverage some of these functions we've been talking about today. And by doing that, you can really decrease the likelihood that you're going to go to the trouble of trying to quote a project, it takes hours and hours and then end up not getting it. So I think it literally gives you a much more sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace.

I think overall, it should make that sales cycle much easier. When we talk about commercial risk, right, that's kind of the legacy side of it. And the next thing we want to talk about a little bit is the commercial opportunity, right? So there were known limitations to kind of existing systems and the way we've done things with HMIs. And this isn't unique to Rockwell, this is, I would say, that evolution over the industry of visualization and machinery. But what we're looking at now is being able to log more of these events right on board, being able to show them in Pareto chart. So I think this first bullet here, we talk about log into call history and I'm seeing customers all the time. And one of the things I ask every one of them is, "hey, if your customer calls up and says my machine keeps stopping, is there an easy way for that customer to figure it out what their top 5 faults are based on either occurrence or based on time of -- downtime events." And the Answer is no, right? Most of these people don't have a great way to do that. Some of our sophisticated end users will pump these things up to a time series database and do some amazing things. But we're able to log and chart some of those things now right on board on the HMI device, which is awesome, and it gives you the ability to be able to answer questions faster and potentially figure out how to either build this into your commercial model to say, hey, we will help you get your machine up and running faster. Or it may be a way to potentially look at selling aftermarket services and support, right? So one of the models we're facing, especially in CPG is most of our packaging and process OEMs have never charged for support. So now we're hitting this critical mass of thousands and thousands of machines out there. The number of controls engineers keep shrinking. We have less and less of them. So every time that phone rings, it's a burden on those individuals. So how do we either charge for that or bake that into the warranty process to make it kind of this commercial opportunity in a way to be better, right? And along with that, we would be remiss to not mention FactoryTalk or about Access. So it's one thing to be able to see what's on that visualization platform and build a model around how you can help somebody faster but being able to remotely connect into that machine, view what's on the HMI, potentially view what's on the controller or other devices, whether that be drives or whatever, a really powerful tool, right? So for those of you that haven't heard of it, it's a cloud-based VPN connection, and it's embedded as a pro version of it into each one of these OptixPanels. If you decide to deploy this on a PC like the ASEM 6300B or P, you can add this remote access software into that as well. So your customer has the same look and feel. It doesn't -- it's not another box that you have to put in your box, right? It's just part of the system. So we think it's really encouraging and powerful. The other thing that we like about it kind of talking about commercial risk and opportunity is the way the licensing model works for that remote access softwares based on the number of concurrent connections or users. So you're not paying for every time. It's out there. It's only when you've got a live connection to it. So I think it should be able to help you save downtime and really increase your rate of support for people.

Yes. And if I could just roll the tape back. There's two types of OptixPanel HMI terminals. There's the OptixPanel Standard, which goes from 7 inches up to 21.5 inches as I mentioned, and then there's the OptixPanel Compact, which is a little tiny thing, but that comes in a 4-inch size and a 7-inch size. The Standard ships with effect to talk Remote Access Pro and the really cool thing about that, that Justin alluded to, is that if you connect through our cloud infrastructure and you establish a VPN connection to the OptixPanel or to a computer, if you're going to use a computer and deploy FDRA to the computer, you connect through the VPN to the remote network where that HMI device is and then with the FactoryTalk Remote Access Pro, you can actually go through that remote device and connect to the remote subnetworks. So if you have controllers there or you have drives, you can actually use that as a gateway to the remote sub network, save yourself a little hardware, save yourself a little panel space because you don't need a separate module. The cost of the concurrent connection is very low. The cost of the Remote Access run time in the case of an OptixPanel was basically 0, and it's a perpetual license. Just the licensing methodology with these OptixPanel is essentially the same as you see with PanelViews. You basically buy the thing and it's licensed forever. So in the case of the OptixPanel Compact, it comes with the Optix -- with the Remote Access Basic, which only gets you to the OptixPanel, so you can patch it, you can load new apps to the OptixPanel. But you can also upgrade that OptixPanel compact to the Pro version as well, so you can use that as a gateway to your controllers that might be running your machine. So it's pretty handy. And I'll echo something Justin mentioned earlier, and then we'll have a brief survey is to say, a lot of OEMs have had spare parts businesses for years. They've had spare parts businesses that are very lucrative because when a customer calls up, they don't want to go and select the specific [indiscernible] or proximity or even a push button. They -- "look, the machine has stopped. I want it running. Okay. Tell me what I got to buy, send me a quote, I'm going to buy whatever it is. I'm going to get it in tomorrow, I'm going to stick this thing into the machine and I want it running again." For them to have to go and find the specific spare part is such a hassle and then it evokes a risk too because they might get the wrong proximity. It looks the same, but the thing was dirty or the little nameplate was scratched and I couldn't tell what I was getting, and I got it in, it was wrong and they just don't want any of that hassle. So there's real value in having an OEM or an integrator provide that level of support with respect to spare parts. And expanding that model to include things like remote monitoring and troubleshooting, to be able to have the operator on the individual HMI device, see what they're seeing, help them over the phone and say, okay, okay, see up in the upper right-hand corner, see that yellow button, you're going to want to press that and okay, press it for me. And they actually be able to walk them through that troubleshooting process. That's a huge opportunity -- a market opportunity for integrators and OEMs. And as you professionalize that and as you deliver higher levels of service, it's something customers are going to be willing to pay for because it's saving them from the downtime and just the heartache associated with all sorts of outages, it has real business value for them too. So next, we're going to run a little survey about the possibility of supplying that kind of expanded service. And why don't you read through that? Are you as a company evaluating that? Are you doing that? Is this something you're just not planning to do and you don't want to or you don't plan to do it for the foreseeable future. Why don't you go ahead and click the radio button there as appropriate based on your own experience with the remote port.

[indiscernible] clicking, I was out with a customer the other day, and they said, we've never charged for support, right, we always do this. And it's just part of our kind of cost of doing business. And I got an e-mail a few days later and they're saying, hey, we need like 6 extra engineers, right? We're at capacity, we're burdened. So I think this inflection point is on the way. So...

No. I could tell you that when I started with Allen-Bradley back before the Rockwell acquisition of Allen-Bradley, one of the very first things he had me doing right out of college was doing support. And that will -- that one went on my permanent record. So I will tell you that as we professionalize that and as we develop the [indiscernible] model and the ability to really support our customers in the way that they deserve, they're willing to pay for it. It is a market opportunity. And that's a matter of professionalizing that and really developing that capability on a really robust basis rather than having people do it part time on an as-available basis, in which case you're not going to deliver the level of service and just it's going to end up not really being as good an offering as you might like. So anyway, it looks like there are some people already doing it, and it's going well, some people on the other end, and we just thought we'd plan to see here and give you something to think about relative to the possibility to do that kind of service in the future. So finishing up here with our conclusion. What we tried to do today is to talk about managing risk throughout that project life cycle, all the way from PRFQ to the proposal to the development and delivery, start-up, ongoing support after the device has been deployed in the field, looking at how that revolves around collaboration within your own organization and also with the organizations you work with, if you're an end user, collaborating with the upstream providers, the OEMs, the integrators, look at what that system is going to -- how it's going to function and how it's going to look and work before you actually run your user acceptance tests and so on, having the ability to work with them remotely, both during and after the implementation. Looking at all of those things, really the intent of all of those sorts of interventions is really to manage risk because as I said at the outset, when you start one of these projects, there's an infinite number of ways that it could turn out, and there's only a few of them that are good. So managing that risk and really pushing that down the happy path as they call it, is really what it's all about in terms of having a consistent set of outcomes and consistent competitiveness and profitability. So with that, I think we have a lot of time for questions and answers, 19 minutes remaining. So you want to hit us with a few questions?