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12 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2020 Feature Interview by Nolan Johnson and Barry Matties I-CONNECT007 Bob Murphy, SVP of Connected Enterprise Consulting at Rockwell Automation, talks about the importance of combining people, processes, and technology solutions to achieve improvement—something that his team spe- cializes in. Nolan Johnson: Bob, could you start with a bit of background on you and the work you've been doing? Also, how are you communicating on this message around human factors? Bob Murphy: I've been with what was originally Allen-Bradley and now Rockwell Automation for 41 years. I started as a production techni- cian in manufacturing, troubleshooting ear- lier renditions of our products, and moved up through engineering, quality, and operations ranks to eventually hold the position of COO for our company, leading our entire supply chain for several years. I still report to our CEO Blake Moret, but I now preside over the Con- nected Enterprise Consulting function. I latched onto the topic of how the people and organizational change dynamic element fits into transformation efforts several years ago. For the first time in the century-plus history of our company, we aligned all of our manufac- turing operations. At the time, we merged 26 plants into one global operations organization called Operations and Engineering Services (OES). It includes all our manufacturing assets. It's all of our sourcing, material planning, and logistics functions, plus the engineering arm for our operations, but it's also all of the common engineering functions for the company where our product segment business units share simi- lar design capabilities. What precipitated the work from a transfor- mation standpoint is that as we aligned all of these plants for the first time into one entity, not surprisingly, we highlighted a wealth of siloed solutions and applications employed across those manufacturing plants govern- ing how work gets done on the shop floor. It can be really hard to leverage technologies and processes in conjunction with the people who engage with them consistently across an enterprise, and the fact was we didn't do that well across our plants. And where we actually Human Factors in Automation