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

Hello, everyone. I'm Allen Grant, Strategic Marketing Manager here at Rockwell Automation for Software, and I'd like to thank you all for joining today's webinar for FactoryTalk Vault. Before we get started, we have a few housekeeping items for you. [Operator Instructions] Today's event will be recorded and will be available right after it's completed. You can access the recording utilizing the same link that you were used to access this live event. After the webinar, we will also send you an e-mail with the resources from today's event including the slides, handouts and the event recorded. Additional information regarding today's topic can be found in the handouts on the webinar platform. And with that, I would like to introduce our 2 speakers today. And that would be Greg Berger and Leo Kilfoy, and I'll hand it off to Leo to start the webinar.

Thank you, Allen. Welcome to the FactoryTalk Vault collaboration revision control -- sorry, slides here -- collaboration revision control for your automation project. So let's get started. Here we go. Welcome. My name is Leo Kilfoy. As Allen had mentioned, I am the Director of Design and SaaS for Rockwell Automation. I'm responsible for Emulate3D, Arena, FactoryTalk Vault and FactoryTalk Twin Studio in the Design Hub. With me today is Greg Berger platform lead for FactoryTalk Design Hub, specifically Greg looks at after a FactoryTalk Vault and FactoryTalk Twin Studio. I wanted to start with a couple of key slides that cover the key -- some of the key values of cloud. SaaS in the cloud and kind of the edge and how it can help you transform your work. So the first thing I want to talk about is access. Cloud provides the ability to access your data, your software apps, your hardware from anywhere and any device. Collaboration is really key. It allows you to extend your automation products to your team virtually beyond just your employees but to include your partners and your end users, your customers. This ensures that the entire team is working from a common set of data and a common set of applications. As everybody knows, cloud is really important for scale. And it's not only scaling infrastructure, but it's infrastructure, teams and capability with ease of use. So think about scaling your infrastructure, your compute horizontally and vertically. Think about scaling your team, ramping up members when project demands it and then be able to ramp them down no matter where they're located with ease. Also, capabilities get access to a portfolio of products to increase your team's capabilities. Another advantage of Cloud is it provides cost models that allowed you to do consumption or subscription models that allow you to pay for only what you use. And performance, we're always bringing -- the Cloud is always being updated, and we're able to bring you the latest hardware, the latest and fastest chipsets, improve your throughput completely scalably and do that on demand. Finally, we wrap all of this in a blanket of -- what I like to refer to as a blanket of security. This includes things such as up-to-date software and make sure your software is patched -- continually patched and monitored for system vulnerabilities, encryption to make sure data that is in transit or unrest -- or that is on disc is encrypted and secure. We provide cloud-based role-based access for access to who can do what in the cloud. And then identity. Identity is very important. It's critically important tools such as multifactor authentication to ensure the identity of who is logging in. So FactoryTalk Hub is our SaaS platform. It's easily found at factorytalkhub.com. FactoryTalk Hub provides a unified -- is a platform itself and provides a unified common login context and data. FactoryTalk Hub is built on industrial strength cloud providers such as Microsoft, Azure and Amazon, AWS. It's a SaaS offering, and it provides the advantage of quickly being able to -- we can -- SaaS provides the ability to quickly deploy for us to deploy products for value-enhancing updates. I'd like to say moving at the speed of SaaS. We oftentimes are doing releases every few weeks with small updates and providing you that value. You don't have to wait a year for that value. FactoryTalk Hub itself is composed of 3 hubs: Design Hub, Operations Hub and Maintenance Hub to represent our life cycle of machine for Design, Operate and Maintain. The hubs are combination of acquisitions we've -- Rockwell has made as well as investments we've made in specific areas for organic development. Maintenance Hub, I'm going to start at the right and move to the left, is anchored by an acquisition of about 3 years ago of Fix. Operations Hub is anchored by Plex, an MES system as an acquisition and along with some in-house developments with some of our edge capabilities. In this session, we're going to focus on design tools and Design Hub. So let me dive a little deeper into that. I'd like to start off with a survey. I forgot I had inserted the survey here. I'd like to start to understand the audience. So I'd like to do a live survey with you. A question for everybody is how soon is your company going to begin investigating your Automation Design -- using cloud for Automation Design applications. So answers 1 through 5 are listed. It's you've already started; you're going to do it within a year; 1 to 3 years from now; we've talked about it, but no plans in the next 3 years; we haven't talked about it. So the results are coming in. And actually, a lot of times what I'll see is blocks either that people have started or people haven't started, and would never use it. So it's kind of a -- we're getting kind of a nice mix here. Looks like a lot of people haven't talked about using cloud for design applications. And the rest of it is pretty even right now. We'll give it just one more moment. Great. So we can see the vast majority haven't talked about it. So this will be new information for a lot of folks. So thank you so much for the survey. We're going to continue on. So what is the Design? Design has an ecosystem that brings teams together. It's focused really on 5 key areas that I've listed here on the slide. They have a central location, enabled multiple personas, access to design, software version history and system testing, experimentation and analysis. I want to dive just a little deeper in each one of those. Central Location, we'll start with a central location that is role-based access that we can provide as a single rally point for your teams to do their designs. It's a whole location for your entire team to collaborate and work on a project. Enabling Multiple Personas. As you know, when you do develop an automation project, it's going to take different people, Mechatronics engineer, Controls Engineer, and a variety of other different personas that need to work together in a system. So we enable -- as the design matures, it gets more complex, multiple people need with different skills need to work together and we want to provide a location for those people to work together. Access to design software, all those personas need different software to be able to access. We provide that in Design Hub, that software on demand. You no longer need to buy the product, go through procurement and do long-term commitments with Design Hub, allows the entire portfolio -- we're providing an entire portfolio of software. And it allows you to just pay for what you use. We have some new SaaS models that we're bringing to market. Another key area is Version History. Bring teams together to understand how -- and you can answer -- I'd like to say you can answer the 4 Ws with Version History. You can understand what a change has been made, what was changed, who changed it, when it was changed and most importantly, why it was changed, make sure that everybody is on the same page. System testing experimentation. We are providing tools that help you do system design. It will help you test your design, allows experimentation to optimize your design and you play the what-if scenarios to innovate faster. So diving a little bit deeper into it. Let's take a deep dive into FactoryTalk Design Hub from a product standpoint and a portfolio standpoint. It's really composed of 5 products. As you can see here on the left. The first product I can talk about is that horizontal blue bar going across. That's -- well that is our data management. That's where I dive down into deep today. But sitting on top of that is Design Studio, Optix and Optix Studio and Twin Studio. Design Studio is a new cloud-based way of programming your controller. Optix Studio is new HMI development. And Twin Studio is a way to bring some of our best-in-class products, make them available to you on demand such as Arena, Logix Designer, Emulate3D and Echo and provide that all connected together, like I said, on demand paying for only when you use it. Finally, all of this is anchored by a remote access. Think of that like your Internet line coming in your home. This is a VPN that allows you to connect down to your factory in a secured manner. Design Hub is a portfolio of products designed to work together. Today, we are going to drill into 2 areas, specifically FactoryTalk Vault and move into FactoryTalk Design Studios. I'll show you -- Greg and I will show you how these products allow teams to collaborate, keep track of who did what and when and access the Design software on demand. So I want to dive a little bit into FactoryTalk Vault, and then we're going to do like one more survey. So FactoryTalk Vault is our place again to -- is our data management, it's really focused at to be able to store and organize all your automation design and when I say all your automation design is not just PLC. We can do PLC, we do HMI, to your control code, your HMI projects, but also your 3D CAD models in your simulation models. If you're using Emulate3D and you wanted to store those and keep track of those in a revision control manner, you can do that. FactoryTalk Vault provides, as I said, the version control and those -- again the 4 Ws, who changed the file, what was changed, be able to compare those files, and we'll show you some of that today of the visualization of those. Why they changed and when it was changed? FactoryTalk Vault allows you to build for your team and your organization to provide access to the data control who has access to that data with role-based access. So we're going to take a little deeper look. But before we do that, I want to start with one more survey. So a quick question in terms of if -- for those people who are doing automation control or HMI projects, you use any source control today with your automation projects. Are you using as an example, Git, GitHub, GitLab or another Git provider such as Azure DevOps, are you using or SVN Mercurial, or bitbucket or another source non-Git source control. Or you using OneDrive, Dropbox iCloud and Sharepoint to manage projects or another set of tools like PLM, PDM? Or are you currently not using any data management tools? Looks like there's a few people using some formal and informal version control. And it looks like the vast majority of you are not using version control. So we'll go to the next slide here. Okay. Really good. Thank you so much for answering the survey. I'm going to go on to the -- I'm going to turn it over to Greg. What we're going to do now is actually take a deeper dive into FactoryTalk Vault, and we'll talk much more about version control and what we're doing there and how. And Greg is going to show us actually how version control works with FactoryTalk Vault. Greg, over to you.

Thanks, Leo. Yes, interesting results there. And just to make a comment there about Git and some of the solutions that others are using. I think some of the design tools that we're going to cover in the next couple of slides, you can find a kind of useful, even for people that are using Git because we'll be able to provide context to those files, and I'll get over to that in a few slides when we talk about the analysis features. But first, I want to start talking about solutions. So solutions as a concept that we have in Vault, where you can define what your solution is. And that can mean whatever you want to mean, but in one of our examples here, that can mean whatever the solution is for your machine or for your system. And so in a solution, you can organize your files and you can start to include your Logix Designer files, your Echo snapshots, your HMI, your CAD files, electrical drawings, PDFs, kind of, et cetera. That way, you have a single source of truth to go and look at your solution and see all your version files, all your immutable files there and all the previous commits done to it. So this provides like a central place for teams to be able to go quickly find your solutions and then quickly find your most current and recent version of those files in a solution. And we'll have some more examples of that as we go throughout these slides. When we're looking at a solution, the next thing within there would be what we call a Vault object. And you can kind of imagine these are just your project files, but it's a little bit more than that. So an object is going to be a representation of a file or sometimes multiple files. And in this case, we're highlighting a Logix Designer file. So users upload an ACD file, but there's more files associated with that. We have our L5x, sometimes L5k and then you have your RDF and AML files. So when you click on this object, all those files are there behind it but we're only presenting the single object. I have one more example of a Vault object, and that is an Emulate3D file. And Emulate3D files are sometimes more than just a single file as well. And in this example here, we're showing that we're actually presenting a thumbnail, the picture that's represent of that model. So when you're looking on the object and you click on it, you can quickly see a screenshot of what that model is. All right. And then going on to the next [ year ]. Another important thing when we're looking at the FactoryTalk Vault is the history tab. So anytime you click on any of these objects within FactoryTalk Vault, you'll see that we have properties and history. And history is where you can start seeing your versioning. This is where you see all the immutable versions of that file and all the edits that have been made to it. And in this example here, you can see that someone wrote in that they have some edits that was done to a particular section of that Logix Designer file. And then you can see all the timestamps and you can even see who's made those edits. It happens me on this file because it's my example. Okay. One more survey question for you guys. I think this might be our last one. Have you ever used the incorrect version of an automation program or project because you did not have source control. And then if so, how much time do you estimate that this cost you to be able to resolve the problem. I mean, I personally I mean, I think I made a mistake last week with a word document that didn't get saved and then had to reduce some of that work. I did on a word document. Not an automation project file, but I mean, still kind of the same concept here. It happens all the time. Sometimes it's less critical files than other files though, all right. So it looks like it's kind of a mixture, right? I guess and also it can depend on how large a project is and if you have collaboration between users. Sometimes if it's just you and you have a very good system in place, you might not run into an issue. But if you're relying on other people and people didn't put the most recent filing and then you took that file and started editing, it can start to cause problems. And that's helping that Vault and the collaboration aspect is something that we can help solve. The next big piece I want to talk about for FactoryTalk Vault is what we call our integrated design tools. So this allows you to have context your files. And some of the examples that we're going to be going through today are going to be the project analysis, which we'll be able to provide context and analysis of Logix Designer files. Upgrade which is taking a Logix Designer file and that's on a previous version, say, like version 28 and being able to use FactoryTalk Vault to upgrade it to the latest version or a different version such as version 35. And then file type conversion. So this is where when you actually upload an ACD file into the Vault, we do a conversion on it. We will convert it to a L5x as well as the RDF and AML file and vice versa, if you were to upload an L5x, we will automatically convert that to an ACD. Then there's a view and visual compare. So this is where you can directly from FactoryTalk Vault view an ACD file. You don't need to open up Studio 5000 Logix Designer to view in a graphical visual format, which is ladder logic, structured text, et cetera, your ACD file. And then, of course, to do a compare to see what's changed in that ACD file from the previous commit version. So here is a screenshot of what our project viewer looks like for an ACD file. And as you can see, it's what you typically expect for ladder logic. But I also want to show this is some screenshots of our function blocks, structured text and sequential function chart. So you can see we're supporting all the various languages directly from Vault. And then here's a screenshot which is a visual compare, compares out today for when comparing in the L5x view, so XML essentially. But coming in this quarter, we'll have a visual compare for ladder logic and also the other languages. And then you can see here that this particular instruction here is then moved to a different run and so that's why you see it has been deleted and then created green and red. Moving on. Here's a video demo of analysis that I made the other day. So here, I'm going to be selecting one of our Logix Designer files and clicking on analysis. And then here, you'll see we have a bunch of different tiles. And all these titles represent some different form of analysis and context on an ACD file. So I'm going to go to the routine summary. And here, you'll start to get an analysis of all routines. And then if you click logic, we can actually visualize what those routines are. So if you want to look at a particular team and see your ladder logic or structured text, you'll be able to do that directly from FactoryTalk Vault without having to leave your web browser or open it up in Studio 5000. And here, I'm just navigating through here and showing that this is a very large project, and it populates pretty quickly. The next one we're going to be looking at here is going to be objects. So think of add-on instructions, UDT, strings and we have a visual here. So that way, when you click on one of your AOIs, you can see all the data types that are made up of that AOS. So you can see we have quite a few that make up this add-on instruction here. And then I'm going to also show that you can resize and then looking at the different strings, you can see everything that's made up of that object. The next one we're going to look at here is interprocessor communications. So these are producing consumed tags. When you start working on systems, as you're aware, they start to get pretty large, you'll need multiple PLCs, they'll all be networked together. So this view helps you visualize which produced and consumed tags are coming from various PLCs. So it's a helpful graphical way to see all the different tags that are coming and going between PLCs. And then finally, we're going to look at a safety analysis. So here, you'll be able to see your safety network number as well as on some modules you'll be able to click on them and see the configuration. And this is where if you're looking at what kind of test mode it is and how it's been configured on different inputs, you'll be able to get that directly from the FactoryTalk Vault analysis, as well as what I'm showing here is you can actually export that to a CSV or an excel file. So that could save some time when you're looking at doing some safety audits. Moving on to our next example, project upgrade. So this is where we can take a Logix Designer file and not just a single file, but we can select multiple files like I'm doing here. And there's -- it can even be various versions. So I think some here at 32 and some are version 34. So I'm going to select all the files that I want to be doing an upgrade on and then I'm going to click that upgrade button up there. And then from there, I'll have the option to select whatever the next highest version is. And in this case, it's 35 because I've selected a version 34 ACD file. And then you can go through here and you can modify the notes if you want to. And then if you're happy with the way everything looks, you can uncheck or check the different Logix Designer files and then you'll be prompted one more time to make sure that you want to do the upgrade. Now once we click upgrade here, I have sped up the video to, I think, 8x. And you can see the status is on those files being upgraded, and they now show that they're being -- they're upgrading. After about a minute, they'll start to switch to processing. And then once they're processed, you'll see that they'll change states to ready. So this will take a few minutes, but you'll be able to bulk upgrade multiple ACD files this way without having to open Studio 5000 and all done directly from FactoryTalk Vaults. Now this last example is about that file conversion. And I'm just showing an example here is when you click on that Logix Designer file and click download, you'll see all the various file types associated with it. So if you wanted to pull the L5x or the AML file, you can do that directly from FactoryTalk Vault. All right. Moving on to what is FactoryTalk Twin Studio. And the reason we're covering this today in this topic is because this is directly tied to Vault, and it can provide a lot of useful applications for some customers. So FactoryTalk Twin Studio is a cloud-based platform that allows you to run applications that you're probably already familiar with directly from your web browser. Those applications include Arena, Studio 5000, Logix Designer, FactoryTalk Logix Echo and Emulate3D. So you can imagine if you want to do a quick change or edit or validate some changes, you can do that directly from essentially FactoryTalk Vault or Twin Studio, both are accessible from the factorytalkhub.com. So on this, the -- are your standard digital engineering tools. But the interesting concept about this is that they can scale with your resources and as well as with your team. So one of the examples I'd like to use here is say you only had 1 or 2 licenses of Emulate3D but for some reason, you had an influx of work and you actually need to have 3 or 4 people using Emulate3D but you don't want to commit to another license. The Twin Studio is a consumption-based model, and this allows you to quickly scale up and scale down as needed and only pay for what you use because of a consumption-based model. So if you only needed to use Twin Studio or Emulate3D for this example, for a couple of weeks of work, you can do that. And we're not going to, I think, discuss the FactoryTalk Universal credits in this webinar but if you go to our Rockwell website and take a look at Twin Studio, you'll see a bunch of information in there about how to get FactoryTalk Universal credits and how they work. And so when it comes to Twin Studio, you'll only be charged for what you use whether that's 30 minutes, 1 hour or a week, you're only charged for the time that you actually use it. And this has been released since January of this year. So here's an example of FactoryTalk Twin Studio. We select a Logix Designer file, and we're saying open this with Studio 5000 and there's also a regional setting there. So we have this deployed in the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific. So here we're opening that Logix Designer file. We're going to open up one of the teams, make one of the modifications. This might look familiar because this is the same as that visual compare that I showed earlier, moving [indiscernible] O down to [indiscernible] C and changing that. And then we're going to save this file. Once we save this file, we're then going to click on the button at the bottom right that says sync with Vault. You know what this does here is this is going to check for any changes and if it detects the change it's going to prompt you and say, do you want to push this change back to FactoryTalk Vault? And I'm going to say, yes. And then once you've done that, you'll get a little successful at the bottom and I'm going to click on Vault here. And this is where you'll see that the file is now switched to updating. And this file will get updated in the Vault and you'll have a new immutable version as your latest commit. So moving on, I have another example here, and this is going to be a Emulate3D. So same thing, we're going to click on the file, say, open Emulate3D. And here you see we have 3 different tiers, small, medium and large as well as we have our 3 regions again. Now the small, medium, large is going to scale the different environment of Emulate3D with the amount of CPU cores and memory. So if you have a small project or a large project, you can select the appropriate size that you need to run that project and have the performance you need. Now in this model here, I made a few deletions of some loads and I'm going to save that model. I've also changed my view on this right now. So when I say this, and then I'm going to sync it back to Vault, it's going to notice the change. We're going to -- it's going to pop up here in a second with that change. I'm going to click, yes, I want to push this back to Vault. And then we're going to get a success that has been pushed. And when a quick -- switch back to Vault, and I click on that object, you'll notice that the thumbnail has changed now to the latest view. So that's just showing that how we are processing and visualizing that data there. And I think that wraps it up for my demos and examples, and I'm going to switch it back to Leo, who's going to talk about how we can get access to FactoryTalk Vault today and what's offered today with FactoryTalk Vault.

Thank you, Greg. So as Greg said, I'm going to dive a little bit into how to get access to FactoryTalk Vault. So FactoryTalk Vault today is available on the Rockwell portal -- there we go, sorry about that, thank you. FactoryTalk Vault is available today on the Rockwell portal, the same way you get all your software through Rockwell. We have 2 tiers of Vault. So the first tier is a free tier. The free tier allows you -- gives you 2 gigabytes of access to try out Vault and try out all the different products. All it requires is a My Rockwell account which if you're an external Rockwell user. It's very easy to set up, free to set up, nothing -- to set up an account. And once you get the account set up, you can go in, try out all the design tools, right now, everything is turned on 2 gigabytes for free. Then we have our premium tier, which is 250 gigabytes of space per user, which gets added to your organization, it gives you full access to design tools, and it costs less than $85 a month, about $1,000 a year. So today, I wanted to talk a little bit about and kind of go back to the original slide that I had that talks about how we're bringing the teams together. Today, we like to bring teams together and how FactoryTalk Vault and Factory Design Hubs specifically bring teams together. We've shown you how a central location with role-based access control can be a rallying point for your team and your design. So everybody is working from the same page. We've -- you've seen how an automation engineer, controls engineer, simulation engineer, different engineers can work together in Vault and how we can bring different personas together for their design by allowing -- and allowing software that is readily available. So you've seen how some of these software pieces connect into Vault through Twin Studio for portfolio simplification. We showed how to bring teams together to understand individual changes and answers to the question of who changed something, what was changed, when it was changed and most importantly, why it was changed. And we've demonstrated that system design approach to perform testing and experimentation, enabling what-if approach for future innovation along the way. So if you want to find out more about FactoryTalk Vault, FactoryTalk Twin Studio or any Rockwell products, a great place to do that is Automation Fair. It's an awesome place to find out more through the keynotes. We have on floor -- we have on the -- on the exposition floor, you can find out more at the summits. There's several sessions where we -- various people will be presenting all kinds of information about Rockwell, not only Vaults and Twin Studio but everything that's all Rockwell. And then also this year, there is some advanced training. So if you think of ROKLive or coming together with Automation Fair, this is a big event that is going to be hosting all that together. This year, it is in Boston, Massachusetts dates -- sorry, here -- it's in Boston, Massachusetts in November, November 6 through 8. So if you want to find out more, check out our website to find out more about Automation Fair. So if you want to find out specific -- we talked today a lot about Design Hub. And if you wanted to find out how to get started, each of the products in Design Hub. Those 5 products I showed you offer ways and then we talked a little bit about how to get access to Vault, all requires is your My Rockwell and most of the -- these are required the same thing. That's your central access point. If you wanted to find out more about Design Studio or FactoryTalk Design Studio, FactoryTalk Optix or Optix Studio, FactoryTalk Twin Studio, which we briefly talked about today. FactoryTalk Vault or Remote Access. This slide here covers how to get access to each of the different free trials and how to get a free subscription into those areas. So you can test them out yourself. With that, I wanted to end the presentation and switch it over to questions so we can do a question-and-answer session. But just if you want to check out a FactoryTalk Hub, again, it's factorytalkhub.com. Thank you.

So let's -- Xavier, do you have any questions?

Yes. There's a few questions here in the Q&A box. The first one. It's kind of a theme from -- there's a few several questions regarding file types and do we use version control for any file? They're talking about HMI files that will work on Vault.

Yes. I can answer that, and Greg you can chime in if you've got anything to add. Great question. So Git itself and the reason why it is FactoryTalk Vault, I do want to talk about this a little bit. Git by itself is really good for small files, and we talked about Git some of the source control. And a lot of that source control comes out of some of the best practices in software development. So we want to bring that best practice over to software development. [indiscernible] to software development -- from software development over to your automation project, we also want to bring it over for all the things in your automation project. So what's really important about this is Git's really good for small text files, being able to do those compares. We want to be able to do that. And we do source control all those files like your PLC files and your HMIs. But in addition, we're also providing the same capabilities on things like your larger binary files like your simulation files, if you happen to be using a an Emulate3D model or an ANSYS model. Those models we can put in there. We'll keep version controls as we start changing those models and you'll be able to see what -- you'll be able to go in there, at least get the notes as far as what's changed, where we can, we're going to provide visuals and differences between them, tool specific. But, yes, we provide version control for any file. It can be a Word doc, it could be a Emulate3D model. It could be a PLC code, such as an ACD model. Greg, anything to add?

I would encourage everybody to head over to the factorytalkhub.com, and then you can login and give it a try. It's -- as you mentioned earlier, we have that free model, which is up to 2 gigabytes. So feel free to throw any comment and give it a try.

Next question here, does Twin Studio require Vault?

No, I'll take that one. So no, Twin Studio does not require Vault, but it does have that built-in integration so you can launch directly into Twin Studio from FactoryTalk Vault. But if you head over to the FactoryTalk Hub, you'll see that you can launch Twin Studio without needing FactoryTalk Vault. But it is just one of those things that, since there's a tight integration between the 2, usually, we see them used hand-in-hand.

Yes, a lot of times -- I was going to say a lot of times people use the free version of Vault with Twin Studio to get going, again, directly from -- the next thing about Vault is and Twin studio working together is as you make changes to your models or to your PLC, your ACD models -- ACD files, you will start to see those changes and you can start to keep track of the revisions.

Does this overlap with FactoryTalk AssetCenter?

No, the AssetCenter, we are working actually with AssetCenter to start in the future, you'll start to see some -- great question, by the way, and just to address that. AssetCenter itself is focused on a lot of what's happening at an operational level. Really kind of primary missions are backup, recovery, keeping track of -- kind of that visuals knowing what's changed on the factory floor and keeping track of the latest versions of that of what's been deployed. Vault starts earlier in the design cycle. So if you think about that life cycle of design, operate and maintain. And the design phase before you can get to deploying, so in a greenfield factory before you start to get deploying working with that. We are working earlier in the design cycle. We are working -- and we have improvements, we have some new features that will be coming out and some integrations that will be coming out in the future with the AssetCenter and new products there -- new integrations there. So we do see the ability to go from Vault into AssetCenter as well as keeping track of those. But today, it is meant to really be focused on the design side, predeployment and then clearly, in the future, going towards AssetCenter is an important step for us.

Perfect. So kind of along the theme of those future improvements. One question here about does Vault serve as a repository for custom libraries in ACM?

Greg, do you want to take that?

So right now, there isn't that integration with ACM. So you can store anything you want in Vault, so you can store your libraries for ACM, but we don't have a direct integration like you would see with Twin Studio to where you could pull those libraries automatically into ACM. But yes, you can there.

Yes, as if -- and I don't want to go too much in the future but in the future, ACM is a definite integration, is on the road map kind of for future integration.

Yes, we see quite a few customers, a lot of customers that use ACM and leverage all those features. So we want to be able to bring that synergy between the 2 products.

This is kind of a general question. I don't know if we can answer it, but do we have consultants who can advise on how to best set up FactoryTalk Hub based on individual needs of our organization?

Yes. Yes, we do. Short answer is if you can't reach out to us, we can put you in touch with groups that can support both presales and post-sales from that and provide services after.

Perfect. And a couple more here, kind of a long one. But essentially, it several components like tags and AOIs and routines are common for this customer's projects. Can they -- are they able to link a set of AOIs or UDTs as a component? And I'm assuming they mean in Vault, they could probably set up the project, but I don't know if you can link a set of AOIs that's component here.

Yes. I think what you mean is assemble the AOIs and keep a library or repository of the -- as an example, AOIs, UDTs in there. Right now, we do identification of those and in some of our analysis tools that Greg had shown, we have a very deep analysis of AOIs, UDTs, et cetera, and data types. Right now, we are not doing, we're just storing; them in as a whole inside of -- so you can think of that L5x for ACD file directly. We're not building that file up today but directionally, that's where we are headed.

Yes. I mean, if the question is about comparing certain aspects of a project to another one, such as like in AOIs, I think that is possible because when you do the compare which is coming out later this quarter, you would be able to select different parts of the project. It's comparing the whole project, but it's not presenting it to you, you have to click on each one. So I think it might do what you're after, I'd say, give it a try when it comes out this quarter.

It depends, I guess, if -- Greg, if you're talking about assembly or comparison. Comparison is exactly correct. We can compare 2 versions, if you have 2 versions of the ACD file, we can compare the AOI to AOI between the files themselves.

All right. One last question here. Do you have any platform for designing automation project from base documents such as P&ID?

Okay. So we're talking about the process here. I'm not sure about that, if we have anything that would -- we talk about automatically generating base projects that would be from looking at a P&ID document. I'm not sure -- it's nothing we have within the Vault. You can store your P&IDs there. But I'm not sure about automatically generating base projects from that.

Yes. I think they're talking about a platform, which obviously, a Vault would not be -- it could store the P&ID for sure.

Yes.

And I think that's it for questions.

If there's more questions, we will be sending -- I believe, Allen, we're going to sending up the questions and answers to the -- to everybody as well as link of the recording.

Yes. Do you have more questions, if we didn't answer a question that you typed in today, don't worry, we will send an e-mail out later with the questions and answers in it. And with that, we want to thank everyone for attending today's webinar for FactoryTalk Vault to keep improving and providing topics of value to you. We kindly ask for you to participate in our brief survey that you'll receive after the webinar. If you want to speak to representatives for more information, you can make the request in your posts, webinar survey. We look forward to seeing you at our next event, and thank you for attending.