Bright Future Predicted for Motion Control Industry
According to a recent report from the Automation Research Corp. (ARC, Dedham, Mass.), the general motion control (GMC) market is experiencing nearly double digit growth. The report also found that the supplier base in the worldwide GMC market is extremely fragmented, representing an opportunity for a strong leader to emerge. Many leading system control suppliers are now reorganizing to place a concerted emphasis on open control software technologies for motion control solutions.
The potential for focused hardware- and/or software-based GMC suppliers is clouded by the increasing strategic market penetration by leading system control suppliers such as Siemens, Rockwell and Schneider. With the presence of these companies, product-focused GMC suppliers are executing strategies to combat this new competition through acquisition and partnering. In the past, system control suppliers considered the PLC marketplace as the cash cow of their product lines. Moving into the 21st century the PLC marketplace continues to approach commodity status and is being threatened by PC-based control, causing the shift to motion control as their emerging revenue generator.
Siemens' establishment of the Automation and Drives business unit as well as Rockwell Automation's reorganization resulting in a Motion and Drives business unit indicates that the target is set for these major suppliers. While these vendors have the technology in place, ARC notes that the challenge will be to transform it into solutions.
Siemens has laid the groundwork by establishing a marketing organization, which is industry- and application-focused. Combined with a well-established sales channel, this move represents a significant threat to both niche and component suppliers in the GMC market.
Another significant challenge for all suppliers is to recognize that motion control today is an extremely application-intensive business. Today, the typical customer using motion control demands a cost-effective and open system solution that is flexible enough to meet various applications.
Component suppliers such as Baumuller, Bosch, Kollmorgen, Matsushita Electric, Pacific Scientific, Oriental Motor, and Yaskawa need to seriously evaluate the impact from these system control suppliers taking aim at the GMC marketplace. Today's niche suppliers in the motion control industry such as Atlas Copco, Infranor, Lenze, and Ormec are no longer secure in their narrow areas of expertise unless they embrace an open-architecture strategy.. In essence, the challenge today is to establish an organization capable of competing with the most recognized brand names in the automation industry.
PC-based logic control suppliers offering software-based PLCs recognized early on the importance of GMC as a component of their future growth. Steeplechase, Object Automation and Think and Do have all partnered with numerous GMC suppliers to offer software-based solutions which offer greater applications flexibility with software along with the benefit of a nonproprietary solutions. The future is bright for software-based motion control products.
Today's challenge is to deploy a proactive marketing plan that combines to identify open control software partners, acquisition candidates to broaden market reach, and a continuation to leap ahead by developing an in-house open control software solution.
According to ARC, the GMC market is poised for strong growth and will only be captured by organizations that have focused on the right mix of market demands, technology trends and channels.