Category: ThinManager

The $20M Challenge Consumer Packaged Goods Shouldn’t Pay For

Miriam Allen

Every major CPG retailer runs a version of the same brutal math. Walmart’s OTIF threshold sits at 98 percent for Collect Ready cases and 90 percent for prepaid On Time delivery, with a 95 percent In-Full requirement, and falling short triggers a 3 percent penalty on the cost of goods. [Source] When you scale that across a full year of shipments, it’s not hard to see how penalties reach seven figures for mid-sized suppliers, exceeding $20 million annually for major CPG firms.[Source]

A stalled line or a dead terminal doesn’t just cost production hours, but can cost you the MABD (Must Arrive By Date), and the chargeback that follows doesn’t go away when the line comes back up. [...]

ThinManager® Is Up to the Challenge; Keep Your Water Clean and Your Network Secure

Miriam Allen

Water/Wastewater facilities can be some of the harshest workplaces: corrosive environments, lightning-prone pump stations, and facilities spread across square miles, not square feet and run by a minimal crew watching all of it. When a terminal fails 40 miles from the nearest technician, “send someone to reinstall the HMI” isn’t a real option. Having things this spread out can create a real management risk.

Water and wastewater facilities also carry a second, quieter risk most industries don’t: their control systems have become a documented target for cyberattacks in recent years, with at least one U.S. utility forced into manual fallback after a breach in 2023. [Source]  As recently as this summer 2026, multiple U.S. facilities have experienced some sort of cyberattack. [Source 2] When the footprint is this distributed, it demands critical infrastructure hygiene to coordinate exactly who can access what, and from where.  [...]

Ultimate Control at 800 Kilometers with ThinManager®

Miriam Allen

Modern mining increasingly runs on a simple premise: fewer people physically on site, more of the operation visible and controllable from a screen, whether that’s a control room hundreds of kilometers away or a tablet in an operator’s hands on the plant floor itself.

Rio Tinto’s Amrun bauxite mine is a real example of what that looks like in practice. Amrun sits in a remote, isolated location roughly 800 kilometers from Cairns, Australia, where Rockwell Automation implemented a set of portable mobility tablets enabled by ThinManager, giving operators access to real-time plant data. With integrated software collecting and managing information from sensors, devices, and systems across the site, operators could coordinate and share that data internally, supporting better decisions without being tied to a fixed terminal. [Source] [...]

Your Food & Bev Plant Has a $30,000-An-Hour Challenge

Miriam Allen

Unplanned downtime in food and beverage manufacturing runs, on average, tens of thousands of dollars per hour, and for large-scale operations, that number can climb into six figures. [Source] Unlike a lot of industries, though, the clock doesn’t stop at lost production. A contamination event or a stalled line can mean writing off an entire batch of perishable product before it ever ships.

One failed terminal on the floor. A cascading, six-figure problem.

This is where ThinManager comes in, by simplifying the orchestration of the software you already run. One platform let’s administrators determine which application, which session, and which access level lands on which terminal, automatically, across the entire plant. [...]

ThinManager’s Important Role in the 2026 State of Smart Manufacturing

Tom Jordan

Modern manufacturers’ most pressing initiatives have been steadily building within Rockwell Automation’s Annual State of Smart Manufacturing report for over a decade. This annual research looks at how smart manufacturing is evolving and provides insights from a wide range of industrial professionals. You can download your own copy here https://www.rockwellautomation.com/en-us/capabilities/digital-transformation/state-of-smart-manufacturing.

While the annual report’s content applies to a range of Rockwell Automation portfolio solutions and capabilities, this article seeks to highlight the associations that relate to ThinManager specifically. I’ll keep it simple by pointing out the page number of the report and how ThinManager’s capabilities overlap with the information on that page. [...]

Containers header

ThinManager® and FactoryTalk® Optix™—Streamlining OT with Containers

Rylee Domonkos

Modern industrial control systems (ICS) face growing challenges, such as how to ensure consistent performance, minimize downtime, manage increasingly complex applications, the expansion of edge devices and central servers over distributed architecture, and maintain security— all without requiring advanced technical skills. In our previous post, we discussed how containers bundle applications with their dependencies for reliable, lightweight deployment across IT and OT environments. Now, let’s explore how Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk Optix and ThinManager use containers to address these issues head-on, simplifying operations and empowering your team. [...]

ep33 >> More Than Usernames and Passwords, Cybersecurity Will Keep Us on Defense for a Long Time

Tom Jordan

Join us for the third episode of season 3 of The Plant podcast. Cybersecurity is everyone’s issue. The problem is, not everyone has a plan to deal with what might be modern society’s largest shared threat.

Listen in as we speak with Ahmik Hindman, Senior Networks & Cybersecurity Solution Consultant, at Rockwell Automation.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/batten-down-the-patches-cyber-security-is-everyones/id1321999652?i=1000669831903

Episode References:

S4 Conference: https://s4xevents.com
Automation Fair: https://automationfair.com [...]

ep32 >> Hard Hats and Safety Goggles – Industrial Automation Protocol Starts with Safety

Tom Jordan

Join us for the second episode of The Plant for 2024. True safety is designed into a system and should be smart enough to keep everyone safe and still maintain a productive output.

“… if a safety device fails, somebody can get hurt, and you probably won’t know it until somebody gets hurt. So you can’t wait on it to fail. You have to be proactive in when you replace those devices. So if you put in a system 20 years ago, then it’s probably about due for replacement of those safety systems.”
— Steve Ludwig [...]

ep31 >> Automation Begets Automation – A Brief History of Increasing Productivity

Tom Jordan

Join us for our first episode of The Plant for season 3. We kick off a new podcast season by taking a look back at early automation technology and how the PLC has influenced countless industries since its creation.

“…the the intuitiveness of people and how we work will always be challenged and we’ll always be able to do better because tools allow us to do better.”
— Kris Dornan

Listen in as we speak with Kris Dornan, Commercial Marketing Manager, at Rockwell Automation.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/automation-begets-automation-discussing-the-history/id1321999652?i=1000664819200 [...]

ASEM6300T from Allen-Bradley

Reduce Your Organization’s Risks to Stand Apart from the Crowd

Tom Jordan

The proliferation of the Internet has created the largest interconnected network of machines the world has ever known. Our connected world is so complex that no one person or group understands everything that is needed to maintain the network and keep it in a healthy state.

The effort to maintain the network as “up” is constant. No matter where you live, someone near you is working right now to prevent something or stop something from losing its connected state. They may work just as tirelessly to get something back online that has lost its connection to everything else.

Of course, most of us never concern ourselves with these issues until we lose our connection to everything else. This scenario recently happened when many woke up to the CrowdStrike outage that caused major business disruptions over the last few weeks, especially for airlines and healthcare agencies.

This is a Big Deal
This issue is a big deal because it demonstrates the real dangers, and highlights the fragility, of a connected world of computers. Almost all these computers have an operating system. If you are unfamiliar, the operating system, or OS, is the intelligence behind every computer.

Even though operating systems are all around us now (PCs, phones, cars, etc.) most of them get updated automatically. The average person does not, and will not, take the time to manage this task manually. Many businesses cannot manage this job any better than individuals. This fact is why businesses like CrowdStrike exist. These datacenters oversee computer systems used by third parties. These third parties rely on their providers to take care of managing and distributing these updates in a planned, secure manner. Good news – this system works most of the time!

The problem is, when it fails, the failure can be wide and catastrophic. The recent CrowdStrike issue is being called the largest outage in IT history.

So if we know that any device connected to a network is exposed to the possibility of being compromised, what steps can organizations take to mitigate the risks associated with a fully connected enterprise? Since making everything less connected is not an option for most businesses, other solutions must be sought. [...]