Driving an adaptable, sustainable and resilient industrial future

A headline of 2025 was that, while still outside the top 10, UK manufacturing had climbed a place to 11th in the global rankings. But for Schneider Electric vice president of industrial and process automation, Kristin Baker, it's much more than a ranking issue; it's an automation gap.

"Lots of sectors of UK manufacturing are stagnant," she says. "Key issues such as the skills shortage, a reliance on legacy systems and the cost of digital transformation are holding companies back. But there is an opportunity to use technology to address all of these issues - to modernise production to be more agile, efficient and productive."

A key issue in the updating of automation systems is legacy drag from technology obsolescence. Gregory Boucard, chief marketing officer at Universal Automation.org (UAO), comments: "We see the biggest challenges in industries that are capital intensive and with systems that have been designed and built to run for a very long time. They often have the oldest assets, and are running lots of different technologies. And even where there is an upgrade, it's not always a long-term solution: a new installation today is tomorrow's legacy problem."

UAO's alternative is open systems, freeing users from any proprietary lock-in. The organisation is driving an open automation ecosystem forward, managing a shared-source runtime execution engine that standardises the software layer across devices and vendors. As a result, companies can reuse automation logic, speed up deployment and innovate more easily. The runtime execution engine allows automation code to run on any vendor's device.

Boucard says: "We now have more than 100 members - both vendors and end users - all sharing the goal of decoupling hardware and software in the automation space."

If open systems are the answer, what does this look like in practice? Neil Smith, global CPG president at Schneider Electric, says: "Traditionally in the development of a system, companies would select and configure the hardware, and then develop the application. But what if we turn this on its head: develop the application first in software, and then select the hardware. This is software-defined automation. And what if we then could have open software-defined automation that offers a vendor-neutral approach?"

This is exactly what Schneider Electric has made a reality with EcoStruxure Automation Expert. "Openness is core to our DNA, going all the way back to Modbus," says Smith. "Now with EcoStruxure Automation Expert we have the first truly open software-defined automation solution. It provides a single, unified automation platform for all control applications, delivering the benefits of hardware independence, distributed intelligence, application centric and digital continuity."

EcoStruxure Automation Expert decouples software from hardware and supports the UAO standard for interoperability, creating a modular system where automation code is portable across devices, dramatically improving deployment time and engineering efficiency.

So what does this look like in practice? An early adopter of this open platform is Italian coffee producer Zicaffe, which has been producing blends in the purest Sicilian tradition for over 80 years. By digitalising its coffee weighing process with EcoStruxure Automation Expert, Zicaffe created full traceability from bean to bag - proving that even legacy operations can embrace innovation without disruption.

Guiseppe Zichitella, IT solutions manager at Zicaffe, comments: "The challenges we face will be familiar to any food and beverage company: volatility in the market, uncertainty and efficiency. We felt we could address a lot of these issues with greater automation of processes, but it's hard to develop individual aspects of our operations because of legacy systems. It seemed that we would have to upgrade complete systems."

Schneider Electric's open software-defined automation enabled Zicaffe to upgrade its weighing process as a pilot, and the benefits were clear straight away. "We saw better control of costs, better stock control, better quality control and better productivity, with significantly reduced downtime. We also have improved traceability."

That initial success has driven greater ambitions for upgrades and automation: "Looking to the future, it gives us freedom to think and imagine," says Zichitella. "We're now looking at more applications, extending the open automation strategy into the packaging lines and other parts of the process where we want to drive down costs."

The importance of being able to upgrade small areas of a plant, easily, in pilot projects is not to be underestimated, Smith argues: "Our first learning was that people generally are comfortable with the status quo. So the ability to start with pilot systems is key, introducing new technology in a controlled way. Then it expands, particularly with young engineers who want to work with these systems, and that's when it really starts to scale out."

Industrial automation, then, is undergoing a transformation - one that is open, software-defined, and no longer tied to proprietary hardware. This shift represents more than modernisation; it is laying the groundwork for a more adaptable, sustainable and resilient industrial future.