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SEW-Eurodrive and GE do deal to sell each other’s products

27 February, 2018

GE Power’s Automation and Controls business and SEW-Eurodrive have reached an agreement to sell each other’s motion control and automation products around the world. They plan to offer complementary solutions for drive and controller-based motion controls for discrete and process applications.

“This collaboration marries our rich set of industrial control and computer products with the strong set of drive automation products from SEW-Eurodrive,” says Rob McKeel, president and CEO of GE’s Automation & Controls business and chief marketing officer for GE Power. “For our customers, this means easier and greater access to a wide range of products and automation solutions.

“The combination of GE and SEW-Eurodrive uniquely enables a new generation of connected machines with rich motion and drive technology,” he adds. “This arrangement is a win-win for both companies and opens up new markets to provide customers with connected control and drive automation products.”

GE plans to integrate SEW’s VSDs (variable-speed drives) and servomotors into its PACMotion product line, enhancing its recently-launched Industrial Internet Control System (IICS), which combines controls and connectivity in a single device designed to bring traditional controls into the digital era. IICS gives machine-builders instant access to the health and quality of their equipment from anywhere in the world.

One of the initial fruits of the new collaboration is the first VSD in the IICS family. Called the PacMotion VFD, it was one of several products that GE unveiled at this week’s Embedded World show in Germany. The rugged, modular drive has a small footprint and is said to provide considerable energy savings to help reduce the lifetime operating costs of electric motors.

Partners: Rob McKeel, president and CEO of GE Automation & Controls (left), with Udo Aull, managing director of sales and marketing at SEW-Eurodrive (right).

SEW-Eurodrive says it is “striving” to integrate GE’s IICS products into its controller-based drive automation systems, to provide analytics that will help to cut costs and improve operational efficiency.

“This collaboration with GE – particularly the ability to capture our domain expertise in analytics easily consumable by customers – is particularly compelling for us,” says Udo Aull, managing director of SEW’s sales and marketing. “The combination of GE’s controls portfolio and our drive automation products provide our customers with a holistic solution for their plant operations.”

Another GE product that made its debut at Embedded World was its PACSystems RX3i CPx400 controller which it describes as “the industry’s first outcome-optimising controller with dual redundancy capability”. The controller augments real-time deterministic control with Edge technology, to deliver a flexible, highly-available system that maximises uptime, while cutting the costs of ownership.




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