Tag: ThinManager

The Million Dollar Pharmaceutical Challenge Hiding in Plain Sight

Miriam Allen

In Pharmaceutical manufacturing, the smallest failure carries the biggest risk. A single terminal outage can compromise a sterile environment, triggering a full multi-week investigation, and can cost a lost batch. 

Thinmanager acts as the insurance that saves you the trouble. 

ThinManager centralizes visualization and access management rather than installing software terminal-by-terminal across a facility. Nothing critical lives on the device, so a failed terminal on the plant floor can be swapped in about 2 minutes, resulting in zero data loss and no reconfiguration. [...]

ThinManager Solves $49 Million Oil & Gas Challenge

Miriam Allen

Offshore oil and gas organizations lose an average of $49 million a year to unplanned downtime, and operators with the worst track records see that climb past $88 million annually.[Source] Unlike factory floors, downtime here carries a safety dimension most industries don’t share: Unplanned downtime in oil and gas creates more than a productivity challenge. Equipment failures, emergency maintenance activities, and unplanned operational disruptions can increase safety risks for workers and contractors. OSHA data shows thousands of severe injuries have occurred in the U.S. oil and gas extraction sector in recent years. [Source] [...]

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. [...]

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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. [...]

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Introduction to Containerization: Bridging IT and OT

Rylee Domonkos

Containerization is a virtualization technique that has existed since at least 2008. It is a type of software deployment that bundles together everything needed to run in a single package. This includes an application and all its dependencies. While historically it’s been used in Information Technology (IT) environments, it has recently been gaining traction in Operational Technology (OT). Modern containerization, popularized by Docker® since 2013, enables efficient, portable application deployment across diverse environments. Industry standards focusing on user experience with containerization have been formed by the Open Container Initiative (OCI). Containerization gives the ability to run applications that would have otherwise been limited by device or operating system. The goal of this post is to demonstrate containerization’s power to streamline application deployment across IT and OT environments, transforming efficiency in modern Industrial Control Systems (ICS). [...]

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 [...]