Open Automation Future of Industrial Automation Talk w/ @schneiderelectric - @ARCadvisory Forum 2023

Open Automation Future of Industrial Automation Interview with Tina Volkringer of @schneiderelectric. Interview conducted by @ARCadvisory 's Peter Manos at the ARC Forum 2023.
Timestamps - 00:00
So can you tell us about your role at Schneider Electric? And I understand you're in a new position, so congratulations. – 00:17
Thank you very much, Peter. Yes. I've had over 20 years in the process control industry. Most recently I am leading the offer management, marketing and sales enablement for process automation. And that is comprised of the Tricon brand, the Foxborough DCS offer, and also some transversal offers such as Ecostructure Power and Process, the collaboration with AVEVA as well as some other strategic partners.
As you assume your new role and the vision that you have for it, how does that align with what you're hearing from your customers about their perspectives on what's next for them and what's important in their values? – 00:57
So our foundation and our strategy and our vision, it's based on four pillars. The first one is our people and expertise, and that doesn't only include Schneider internally, but our customers. The second is around simplicity and quality. We want to simplify our customer's processes. We want to simplify our own processes in the way you do business with us. And also quality is core and key in all of our products, offers, and services. The next is customer centricity. Customer centricity is core of what we do and we need to make sure that we're taking voice of customer into the different offers, into our prioritization and into our strategy. All these enable us to move forward with the strong foundation to open automation.
Excellent. And we've spoken previously about open automation. How could you, for our new coming listeners who might not have all the details about it, how do you elaborate on the value proposition with open automation? – 02:02
So open automation is really the future of industrial automation. If you look at what customers, what the market trends are going towards, we need digital transformation. This open architecture and decoupling of hardware and software allows that. It also leverages, if you look at the aging workforce, it allows us to be able to transfer that knowledge. It allows us to give the open environment and more flexibility for our customers in how they manage, operate, maintain their control systems.
That makes a lot of sense. So we're dealing with a very risk averse culture and the trends you just described along with other trends are risks that asset owner operators are facing. So how do you address that risk averse culture given the acceleration in technology and the need for them to be more responsive to their end users as well? – 02:58
So the first step in that is making sure that our legacy offers are maintained, secure and reliable. So as we are shifting to the open automation, we're bringing the customers along on this journey and making sure that we're currently supporting in doing it in steps. So adding this on different lines that you could do it and not a big bang if you would. So doing it in step changes. Also educating people on the benefits of optimizing the performance of your process as well as being able to upskill and train that workforce that I mentioned earlier in looking at that. So that is really the way you shift the mindset of the customer because obviously we have customers that are more conservative and they'll take a little bit more convincing, but I think if you bring it in and you have it on one line or add it on top, that they can see the value of it and how they can optimize, bring more value with data and the whole digital transformation, and be able to really transform their workforce to support the needs of today in all of their while improving their business outcomes.
That makes a lot of sense and it is a great way to roll something out because the momentum builds naturally and it rolls out naturally. So anything else you'd like to leave our listeners with as we wrap up and look at the week we've had so far here at ARC's Forum for 2023? – 04:41
It's been a really exciting week and I'm real excited about my role and I'm serving the process automation industry and our customers.
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