Bosch Rexroth offers products for drive, control and motion technologies worldwide.

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While there are smaller companies that provide innovative products for drive, control and motion technologies, none of them has the global presence or the financial leverage to supply its customers on a worldwide basis like Bosch Rexroth Corp.

“Bosch Rexroth is known as one of the innovative and technological leaders in the industry,” says Richard Huss, vice president and general manager of the electric drives and controls division. “But when it comes to being able to come out with an innovative product and supply a customer globally, that’s our forte.”

The company was founded as Indramat Corp. in 1967, and was a U.S. division of Rexroth GmbH, a German manufacturer of industrial products. The Bosch Group acquired the company from Mannesmann and merged it with Bosch Automation Technologies to form Bosch Rexroth.

Today, the company manufactures electric drives and controls, industrial and mobile hydraulics, linear motion and assembly technologies, and pneumatics. Bosch Rexroth also offers service and training for end-users of its products. Bosch Rexroth is headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Ill., where it has 88,000 square feet of manufacturing space and more than 200 employees in this location, with more than 25,000 employees worldwide.

Huss took time to speak with U.S. Business Review about unifying the manufacturing industry’s system of communication, Bosch Rexroth’s recent software upgrade and his vision of the future.

US Business Review: Are there any recent developments within Bosch Rexroth?
Richard Huss: We’re looking to do a lot with productivity and data collection we’re working with the Association for Manufacturing Technology, and they’re working on something called MTConnect, which is a standard communication protocol for getting real-time data from the factory machines on the floor up to the plant, so [businesses] could do a number of things with that data.

One thing we will work on is productivity enhancement, which looks at the machine’s current status and compares it with the profile the machine exhibited when new, and if something is changed or appears to be going wrong corrections can be made ahead of time before the machine goes down or out of tolerance.  Companies can enhance productivity by making some adjustments in the machine before quality problems occur on the products or they experience down time.

Also, we have implemented Safe Motion. Usually, when there is a jam in the machine or someone has to get through the guarding, the whole machine must be shut down so they can fix it, after which they go back and start the machine. With Safe Motion, we instituted a dual processor technology so customers can open the gate without turning the machine off and have a safe condition to go in, remove the jam and start running instantly again.

USBR: What trends have you observed taking place in the industry recently?
RH: One of the things we’re doing is creating a software suite of programs for all of our products, as well as almost all other Bosch Rexroth products. Engineers can drag-and-drop components in their applications, size all drive components and integrate all products so they can easily work together.

All of our control sections for our drives are the same. If someone wants a 100-watt drive or a 250-kilowatt drive, they both program the same, it is no different.

USBR: Can you describe a challenge Bosch Rexroth has overcome?
RH: A big challenge for the industry in general is firmware and software compatibility and upgrading.

One of the big advantages of our product is, we get to use processors and switches that are developed inexpensively through the consumer electronics industry and are very reliable, like those in cell phones and computers.

But the consumer lifecycle for those products is a couple of years, and the industrial lifecycle is 10 to 20 years. The plants keep the product and all the pieces in the product, and upgrading with new technology is a huge challenge for all of us.

We’ve put in specific versions of controls so when we set up different versions of a product, we have the same number system, depending on the product.

USBR: What is your vision of the future for Bosch Rexroth?
RH: Bosch Rexroth will continue to advance as a solution provider in automation and hydraulics. On the Automation side, we will expand our markets and provide more integrated solutions using all our technologies – pneumatics, hydraulics, mechatronics, and electronic drives and controls. Customers will migrate into two camps: (one that wants) to integrate the best components in their class into their machines (and one that wants) companies with a high degree of expertise in all drive and control technologies to provide innovative highly productive solutions. We can provide both.