Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Head of Investor Relations and Market Strategy, Jessica Kourakos.
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Rockwell Automation's Annual Investor Day here at Automation Fair in sunny Houston, Texas. We're thrilled to be back in person and have what I hope to be a great experience for you today. This year's Automation Fair is certainly like no other. For the first time in our history, we will be hosting an in-person Automation Fair and simultaneously a virtual Automation Fair to allow for participation for our customers around the world in the ways that are most comfortable for them. We're excited to welcome 10,000 customers, which is double the amount of customers we saw last time we were here in Houston. This year's event will include a variety of in-person and virtual experiences for attendees to take part in.
To take part in, including more than 100 product and technology sessions with our exhibitors showcasing their offerings across more than 300,000 sq ft of exhibition space, and with more industry forums than ever before. The morning session of our Investor Day event included a terrific panel of market access partners, where they discussed how we are winning together, driving more value with our customers. Following that, our in-person attendees took a curated tour of our Automation Fair show floor, showcasing many of our newest offerings.
As you can see from our agenda here, we're super excited about sharing even more with you all here in person as well as virtually. At the end of our prepared remarks, we will host a Q&A session. Any questions you have for us should be posted on the web portal, even if you're here in person. Please make sure you have logged in to be able to participate. You can post questions at any time during the prepared remarks. With that, let me now turn the mic over to Blake Moret, Chairman and CEO of Rockwell Automation.
Thanks, Jessica. Yeah, let me also add my thanks to everybody who is here in person and also those who are tuned in remotely today. You know, for those of you who are here in person, hopefully you'll feel the same kind of boost of energy that I feel that comes from just the simple pleasure of being, you know, in physical presence of other people, seeing people in 3D, and certainly have enjoyed that over the last couple of days. A good chance to catch up last night as well. We're gonna talk over the next hour or so about how we're taking manufacturing to a whole new level. We're helping our customers become more resilient, agile, and sustainable across a really diverse portfolio of different industries.
We're very proud of the progress we've made, but we're even more excited about where we're going. You know, a couple of years ago, in November of 2019, we introduced this framework for accelerating profitable growth. We talked about very clearly the different elements of that growth, beginning with faster growth and share gains in our core. Double-digit growth in information solutions and connected services, and using our strong financial capabilities to increase growth from inorganic means. I am very happy with the progress that we have made. That framework and the financial guidelines, if you will, that accompanied it are playing out even through the pandemic, and we're gonna talk in greater detail about how we're operationalizing that path to $9 billion and beyond.
One of the things that I'm most proud of is the way that we're diversifying even further across multiple industries. You know, one of the things that Mark Anderson from ProMach talked about this morning is how, you know, he serves a lot of diverse industries with his equipment, and that's further complemented by Rockwell's learnings across multiple industries. You can see that whether it's in electric vehicles, or semiconductor, or e-commerce, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage. I know that one of the things that was attractive to Schlumberger when we first started talking about the Sensia joint venture was about how Rockwell's understanding across multiple industries could add best practices, if you will, into the business of making the oil and gas business more efficient.
I had a chance to catch up with Olivier Le Peuch earlier this week, where we both affirmed that those fundamental, you know, value propositions remained. Efficiency is a really important part of reducing carbon emissions and delivering value in that industry. For these reasons, I believe that nobody is better positioned to bring together information and operational technology to help our customers be more resilient, agile, and sustainable. We're doing it with a simplified set of brands. Rockwell as that umbrella, Allen-Bradley as the main brand for hardware, FactoryTalk for software, and LifecycleIQ Services for services and solutions. Within the software side, we're particularly proud of the progress that we've made just over the last 18 months.
We have a great set of suites of on-premise offerings across the customer's life cycle, design, operate, and maintain, and with PTC, the innovation suite. With the combination of both organic development, some of which was accelerated over the last year, as well as the acquisitions that we've made, our hub offering of SaaS, of cloud native software with Plex, Fiix, and the Design tools, is something that we think is special and differentiated in our industry. I'm gonna tell you, and you'll see it later, we've only just begun. We've also talked about the basic building blocks across all of our offerings. If you look at this, you know, view of the automation and information world, this informed the way that we reorganized a year ago to make ourselves even more understandable for internal and external audiences.
The final mile devices, that's where you see some of our partnerships and at the enterprise software level partnerships, and then you see intelligent devices, software, and control, and the services and solutions, and that's the way that we're organized. We bring all that together with a systems approach to be able to bring about positive outcomes for our customers. It's all those pieces coming together to produce outcomes. With that, I'm happy to introduce Cyril Perducat, our new CTO, and George Young, Managing Director of Kalypso, to give a little more insight into just how we're taking manufacturing to a whole new level.
Thank you, Blake. You mentioned the importance of the system and the sum of the capabilities available at Rockwell Automation today. How do we move this to the next level? How do we move manufacturing to the next level? When I look at the sum of those capabilities in terms of hardware, software, and services, I think Rockwell Automation is uniquely positioned to create a new type of outcome for customers. We see four fundamental evolutions in our industries that are going to support the evolution of those outcomes. We see an evolution, first of our systems going from being hardware-defined to being software-defined. It's not everything moving to the cloud.
It's a combination of devices, edge, and cloud working together as a system defined by software so that an application can run on different types of hardware depending on the needs of the application and the needs of the customer. Those systems need to be operated in an environment that is not anymore specialized in terms of control or safety or motion, but unified in terms of a converged control system that integrates not only traditional control, but also safety, security, and robotics, as we have illustrated in our partnership with Comau. We also see cyber-physical systems evolving toward more autonomous systems, but more importantly, those autonomous systems are partnering with an augmented workforce. This creates the ability to give additional capabilities to the augmented workforce. It's like giving superpowers to people that you have in the shop floor.
Instead of trying to find superheroes on the market that you will not be able to find, it's having the ability to give superpowers to normal people so that they can operate a manufacturing environment to the next level. Ultimately, it's moving operation management from being another software tool to being empowered, augmented by artificial intelligence, so that we can drive operation management to a new level, with also some different types of business models like software as a service or digital services. A very important element to achieve this vision is how we apply AI across the architecture of Rockwell Automation. It is a reality for us today, not an intention. We can see AI as a level of devices, making intelligent devices smarter. Think about the drive, think about the sensor.
It could be AI in the cloud, like what we do with Fiix, so that we are able to predict maintenance activities and derive a work order for the maintenance teams. It's also AI directly in the rack of the PLC, so that you can create a closed-loop control system that permanently learn and optimizes control parameters depending on the outcomes that we want to achieve with the customer. When we unify all those different applied AI capabilities at different piece of the architecture, this is when we can really realize the value of an automation flywheel, unifying, sensing, activation, and control all together, being able to derive those new type of outcome for customers, creating this closed-loop control system from device to edge to the cloud that help customer reach this next level of manufacturing operation.
A very fundamental element in this architecture is our ability to create digital twins. These representations of a physical system that evolves, learn, and improve from design to operation and maintenance, that is able to create the data foundations that are important to build those closed-loop systems. George is going to illustrate, with examples, what we are doing today in reality with customers through Kalypso.
Thank you very much, Cyril. It is a wonderful thing to be back in front of real customers and to be addressing you from my hometown of Houston, Texas. As Cyril mentioned, we're delivering real results today and real benefits to our customers with the digital twin. The digital twin is a superior representation of a physical thing. We say superior because we can model it in a lot of different ways. We can use these digital twins to predict real behavior and therefore reduce cost, deliver efficiency, and deliver innovation to our customers in a variety of applications. In the looping video that you see, you can see examples of digital twins from multiple industries, from discrete manufacturing to consumer to aerospace and defense, automotive, retail, and others.
You're also seeing that we build digital twins across the enterprise value chain from discover to create to make to sell and deliver. When you link these digital twins, these models together to describe the enterprise value chain, you are delivering something we call the digital thread. The value that the digital thread and these digital twins deliver to our customers is that they can develop products virtually. They can build plants virtually. They can model the behavior of how a new product will behave when it's manufactured, and they can build supply and delivery fulfillment models to understand what the impact will be in the market.
What I'd like to emphasize in conclusion is first, that the digital twin is delivering real value today to our customers. Secondly, we are delivering these twins across a variety of industries and across multiple points in the enterprise value chain. This is giving our customers the ability to deliver more predictable processes. It's allowing them to build plants more quickly than they have in the past, and it's driving efficiency in cost, production, quality, and automation.
Thank you, George, for grounding the reality of digital twins in what we do with real customers today. I think we see a lot of different technologies, a lot of different possibilities. This could be complex. It doesn't need to be. Simplicity wins. What we believe is that in order to deliver to customers the value of those autonomous systems, we need to build a best-in-class user experience that really creates a difference. Have you ever looked at the user manual of your smartphone? Would you be satisfied if you had to search in this user manual every time you want to find a new feature? It doesn't need to be like that. Our aim at Rockwell Automation is to deliver this simple best-in-class user experience so that the value of those autonomous systems is actually delivered to customers and users. Thank you, and over to you, Blake.
The things that I'm proudest of in the journey that Rockwell is on are the way in which we've been able to bring in new perspectives to complement those of us who have been within Rockwell for a long time. I think Cyril and George represent that as well as any. You know, we have added quite a bit to our ability to create these digital twins and to be able to complement our traditions in hardware with the software, but the services and the digital consulting that Kalypso has provided to be able to explain how our software, our Emulate3D simulation software, the technology that we have with our partners like PTC and Ansys, and you saw Jim and Ajay last night at our reception.
Bringing these all together into an easy-to-understand story about how the parts can come together to create business outcomes that were not achievable even a few years ago is something that is most exciting to me about this point in our journey, and it's only gonna get better. We have to build capacity across the entire enterprise to support the current and future growth. There's a couple of important aspects to that. The first is to have an integrated set of business objectives that tie together the individual efforts of everybody on my team and their teams to support this plan to accelerate profitable growth, all parts working together to support the whole. That's one of the benefits of being a pure play company, is that we can do that and bring all the pieces together.
We've added more rigor to those integrated business objectives than we've ever had before. It's something that Vena's gonna help us with from her new role in charge of strategy and corporate development, but there's gonna be participation across my entire team. It's also about the specific plans that we have to bolster our technology and expertise, our supply chain, our go-to-market motions, and our digital infrastructure. We're gonna talk a little bit about that over the next few minutes. We talked about this as a framework with plenty of room to go, but I'm happy to say that we do expect to get to and beyond $9 billion in the next two to three years. What was a vision in 2019 has turned into operational parameters that we have the whole organization working together to accomplish. Let's look at that.
Since 2016, we've seen nice growth. We've seen our core grow. We've seen our information solutions and connected services offerings more than double over that period of time, representing new value. We've seen acquisitions and other inorganic investments contribute materially to catalyzing the acceleration of this strategy. We expect that to continue to go with lots of differentiation at each level of this model. When we start with the core, expanding our vertical focus, just in the last 24 months, we've seen certain industries come to more prominence in our model for where the growth is gonna come from. Certainly, electric vehicles, we saw it coming, and it's coming, and it's gonna continue for a long time. We see e-commerce, but not just with the big e-commerce suppliers.
We see the big box retailers automating as well their material handling. They move billions of boxes, and there's a lot of opportunity there, and we're playing a strong role in that. Semiconductor. It's not conjecture anymore about the amount of CapEx that's being spent in the semiconductor. Our expanding role with those companies is something that continues to contribute to our growth. Obviously, food and beverage, our single largest vertical, I think people are gonna continue to wanna eat. Pharmaceuticals. People are gonna wanna live longer, healthier lives, and we're proud of the role that we play with vaccine production around the world. All of these are something that we're particularly proud of. When we look at technologies, we talk about the independent cart as a great example of disruptive technology, but there's others.
We have a full plate of new product introductions this year. Our on-machine portfolio, new IO, and new process functionality. We're picking up the pace in terms of those new product introductions across our entire portfolio. An area of particular focus is as we add new capabilities with cloud-native software in the design environment, to be able to attract new customers. We're gonna continue to support, and that's famous in the industry, customers who are happy with current tools, but the opportunity to expand and get to new customers is the primary focus of this development area.
You'll hear from Brian in a little bit about that. When we look at information solutions and connected services, again, the cloud-native software that we bought or built and that we're continuing to add to, connected services, things like the digital consulting that George talked about, and cybersecurity. I'll talk a little bit more about those things, but now let's hear a bit from Brian as he talks about our software.
Thanks, Blake. Let's take a deeper look at our software strategy by starting with a view of the market. We all know that the industrial software market is huge at $20 billion. Increasingly, we see it becoming more dynamic. Customers are changing their behavior in industrial software. They want easier- to- deploy, easier- to- use solutions, and that's driving a preference for cloud. We see that that's a huge market driver for us, and it informs a big part of Rockwell's software strategy. Our software strategy is broad in scope. We've outlined it in five moves that overlay perfectly across our customers' production system, the way that they view the life cycle of their activities, and the technical architecture that they use to do their manufacturing activities. Let's look at each one of these five moves in turn.
With move number one, it's very close to the core of Rockwell. We're bringing new cloud-based software to the process of automation system and visualization system design and deployment. Customers want this new capability. It's multi-user and collaborative. It takes a system view of the automation design, not a controller view. So it's very broad in scope, and we're delivering the most modern programming approaches into the hands of our users. This really allows Rockwell to serve new users in new industries and grow bigger opportunities. Move number two is about going big in the cloud for production operations. Again, these are software areas like manufacturing execution, supply chain management, quality management, asset management, and even more. These are perfect applications to take advantage of cloud-based technologies.
Our customers want to see the benefits of easier- to- deploy, easier- to- use, and easier- to- maintain software applications in this space, and those are all benefits delivered by the cloud. That's why Rockwell made the acquisitions of Fiix and Plex in FY 2021, growing our ARR by more than $170 million in that area. Move number three is all about the data. Rockwell is breaking down the traditional silos of manufacturing data, putting that data in context and making it available for all of the uses in the enterprise where it can create value. We have new offerings for edge data management that have a special integration with our huge fleet of Logix controllers. We're bringing new cloud-based collaboration and data management solutions to market, allowing teams of engineers to work together effectively.
We're on a journey to bring a new platform that really increases the amount of data interoperability and common services across the Connected Enterprise production system. What we've seen is that companies want to do business with their OT supplier, like Rockwell, in this area of edge connectivity, moving OT data to the cloud. We really feel like we have an advantage in the solutions that we're bringing to market here in move three. Move four really takes advantage of all of that data with new applications and analytics. In this case, Rockwell is working with close partners like PTC and Microsoft, bringing their technology plus our technology, and , most importantly, our know-how and expertise in the industries that we serve to create new sources of value, like low-code applications, applied analytics, and connected worker experiences.
It's no surprise that three out of four companies are planning to increase the amount that they're spending in this area over the next five years, and we're gonna have the perfect set of applications to address their needs. The fifth and final move of our software strategy is about modernizing production system design. Here we, again, with our partners, want to bring a modern portfolio of digital twin approaches and technologies into the hands of our core manufacturing engineers who are designing all of the elements of new production capacity. I think this will again revolutionize and really increase the speed to market for our customers. In a crowded field, I think there's four reasons why companies do business with Rockwell. The first is around context. Not only do we generate the data, but we also know what that data is supposed to be.
We can put that data in context to understand whether it's a problem or normal. That really allows us to move to the second point of differentiation, which is control. We can close the loop and drive productivity improvements and increases in efficiency. It's a privileged position in the architecture of a connected factory. The third is around the cloud. Rockwell is leading in the move of industrial software to the cloud. That's both through our organic development activities and the acquisitions that we've made. The fourth is around credibility. Rockwell, with more than 100 years of experience in production manufacturing across a wide variety of industry segments, has all of the expertise, and know-how, and trust in order to be that guide for our customers on their journey to digital transformation. Blake, back to you. Thanks.
Yeah, I think it's a great, clear view of what we're doing with respect to software, and I'm proud again of the progress that we've made, even just over the last 12-18 months, to significantly increase what we're offering and what you saw on the show floor today. The technology is complemented by the services. You obviously need to have strong deployment capabilities to be able to ensure the great outcomes, and we're proud of that. T he way that we've expanded our traditional solutions capabilities from those that were very biased towards hardware integration to now including the software and the information side in a big way through both organic and inorganic moves . It's also about at the very front end, when a customer knows they need to do something but isn't exactly sure where to start, it's helping them better define their business problems.
That's an area that Kalypso, and now with the AVATA acquisition, is particularly helpful for, Maverick as well, to be able, with industry expertise and credibility, to be able to work with the customer, help them define what they're really going after, and then give them a step-by-step approach, help them form the team and quantify the expected benefits. We're seeing that as such a tool for our sales force to be able to have that second conversation and that third conversation from the initial identification of a problem. We're happy with that. With cybersecurity services, you know, that business has arguably grown as fast as anything within the company.
Starting from, you know, close to zero a decade ago, we've seen it pick up speed, and certainly, the industry drivers for that and our capability to differentiate with our own capabilities and with strong partners is something een that we're especially proud about. We highlighted this morning, and we'll talk a little bit more about it in a minute. Acquisitions with strong alignment with our strategic priorities have been and will continue to be an important part of the way that we move faster. Again, going from a handful of bolt-on acquisitions every year or two to something that is a material part of our growth and the ability to add new talent into the organization, new perspectives, that's been very, very helpful for us, and we expect that to continue. You'll see those priorities similar, but with a notable addition of advanced material handling.
That comes in several forms, and it's not just hardware. It's about new forms of motion control. Independent cart is certainly an example of that, but there's other innovations and disruptors in traditional rotary motion control as well. There's the concept of universal control for robotics, as well as line control that Cyril touched on. When factories add more automation and more robotics, that's a good thing for us. As you may have seen out on the floor, the work that we're doing with Comau and with DENSO is an example of where we're showing with our more performant Logix that we're able to address motion control, including robotics, in one platform, as well as the line feeds and the other traditional forms of programmable control. That's efficiency and simplicity for our customers and more value coming from us.
Then, simulation, along the theme of intelligent conveyance, Emulate3D, a core use case for that software, is to simulate flow in material handling applications. Some big customers that you would all recognize are using this as a fundamental part of their ability to develop big fulfillment centers around the world. This is a lot about the technology and the expertise that we're building to support this growth. Let's talk a little bit now about some of the other key contributors to fueling and sustaining that growth to $9 billion and beyond. Our go-to-market is a vital piece of that. As all of you know, the go-to-market motions for selling a more subscription-intensive offering, SaaS solutions, require a different motion and more direct activity than we have traditionally required with our traditional offering.
Scott, with his sales and marketing organization, working in concert with the rest of the company, is making some specific moves to make sure that we're set to sustain and even to lead that growth with the new motions that are required. It's adding additional software selling resources, and we've been talking about this for a couple of years now, and that has not abated. We're continuing to be able to bring people into the organization with that expertise, as well as an outcome focus, because selling software is about selling outcomes. It's about supporting and coverage of accounts in those expanded verticals, making sure that as our value is being recognized in those new verticals, we're calling on the customers who can give us orders in those areas, and making sure we have the coverage there.
It's about leveraging the high velocity, closed- loop sales and marketing motions that we're learning about from some of our acquired companies. Fiix, in particular, has a great high velocity sales motion that combines marketing with inside sales and outside sales, and we're looking at expanding that throughout the organization for the appropriate parts of our offering. Again, one of the reasons that you make these acquisitions is the introduction of new perspectives, new best practices to move you faster into these areas in a general sense. tactical things like a global deal desk to reduce the friction with which we can pull complex orders that involve different parts of our offering across the line.
We're working on all these things in parallel and in a coordinated way for the introduction of the new technologies. Our market access partners, as you heard about this morning, are evolving with us, and I thought they had some great perspectives talking about some of Rockwell's differentiation, as well as some of the ways that they themselves are evolving to keep pace with evolving customer needs. We're gonna show now an interesting OEM that is standardized on Rockwell for the construction of automatic guided vehicles. Let's hear from RedViking.
My name is Mark Sobkow. I'm the Vice President of Manufacturing Solutions here at RedViking. RedViking has been a provider of automation and guided vehicles for over 30 years. We come from a manufacturing background, and we can provide our customers with a complete, thought-out solution for their manufacturing needs. RedViking and Rockwell have been in a partnership since the beginning of our company. The amount of support available and the level of support are outstanding, and they're also able to make our deliveries when we really need them. Recently, we've had an explosive amount of growth in our automated guided vehicles, or AGVs, and a big part of that is driven by some of the pandemic concerns. Other parts of it are driven by the real need and desire to automate more.
In that segment, Rockwell has stepped up to the plate. They've given us new product offerings. We've combined existing technologies in ways that we hadn't thought about before. We've come up with a really, really good solution that our customer base has just grown. Some industries that historically haven't been as automated are really moving forward. Other industries that have been automated are taking it to the next level. There is a whole new segment that is coming to bear on the industry from electric vehicles. We see the electric vehicles coming through in Heavy Trucks and in Automotive , and that base is rapidly tooling up to support old plants as well as new plants.
One of the reasons we chose Rockwell is because of their products. Number one, they're cutting- edge. They're leading edge. They lead the market. Number two, they've got great ease of use. Their technology is top-notch, and their support is also the best in the business. That's where RedViking has been able to satisfy our customer base with the partnership of Rockwell.
An important part of the infrastructure that we're putting in place to support this growth to $9 billion and beyond is our technology partners. You heard this morning about some of our various partners, including the CEO of Claroty, Yaniv Vardi. Yaniv is actually here, I think, this afternoon. We were planning to have a little bit of additional conversation about how we're working together there. Yaniv, I can welcome you to the stage. You know, Yaniv, we have seen the growing importance of cybersecurity, there are a lot of people paying more attention and looking at segmenting the market, looking at the various suppliers and trying to determine, you know, who are gonna be the winners in this space. I know recently you've had some recognitions from the industry. I wondered if maybe you can just talk a little bit about that.
Sure. Thanks, Blake. It was very exciting to get Forrester, one of the leading market research firms in the world, to announce and come up with a report that selected us as the market leader for industrial cybersecurity and scored us the highest score. I think the fact that Forrester actually came up with a report and deployed their resources to address the industrial control system cybersecurity is evidence and a testament to the market demand today. You know, thinking about digital transformation, for example, it didn't start now, right? It started with Industry 4.0.
You know, in simple words, companies are trying to automate and optimize their traditional manufacturing processes, hence, you know, connecting their industrial control systems and creating exposure and risks. That's a huge demand that we see in the market. On top of many attacks, you see the frequency and the impact of these recent attacks, that by itself create a huge demand in the market. I'm very fortunate to partner with Rockwell and really address this huge market need today.
Yeah. I couldn't agree more. You know, it's great that you know, we have such a good partner that's getting this recognition. Of course, at the end of the day, it needs to translate into business. We talked a little bit about a European automotive OEM that went with our solution. On the consumer product side, we've seen some nice at -scale successes there as well.
We do. We follow the best of breed approach, right? I mean, we got some nice wins recently, consumer goods, food and bev companies. It's really a testament to the way we approach the business and our value proposition together. I actually asked the CISO of that company, one of the leaders, "Why did you select us?" What she said was very clear. She said, "Look, we're looking for a trusted advisor, someone that can provide a complete solution, a one-stop shop for the hardware, the services, the technology, someone we can trust to get it all done." I'm very proud of the holistic approach that we are pushing forward together. Again, a huge market demand and explosive growth that we're expecting to have together.
Yeah. Looking forward to more success.
Thank you so much,
Thanks Yaniv . Thank you.
Appreciate it.
As we move from market access and technology partners, something that's on all of our minds is the ability of our operations, of our integrated supply chain network, to be able to meet and sustain the growth going forward. With that, we're gonna listen to Ernest Nicolas, who is our Chief Supply Chain Officer, talking about the moves that we're making to make sure that this is in place.
Rockwell's integrated supply chain organization is responsible for expanding our capacity to support our ability to compete in this multiyear expansion of the automation industry. While the majority of our supply chain organization is focused on navigating through the ongoing supply chain challenges, we've created a dedicated team to focus on capacity expansion, which for us is truly an acceleration of an ongoing supply chain transformation. We have three main focus areas for our capacity expansion. The first focus area is expanding physical capacity across the end-to-end supply chain. This includes capital expenditures for more automation, new assembly lines, tooling for new and existing suppliers, and test equipment. We're also making significant investments in workforce development to be certain that we can retain our people, considering the significant amount of hiring that we're doing within the organization.
This is all part of a $40 million investment going toward infrastructure to support the significant ramp we expect in our sales growth. The second focus area is around our supply chain digital transformation, where we are deploying technology to augment our decision-making capabilities. We are building upon our internal FactoryTalk InnovationSuite investment in closed- loop scheduling. We are now leveraging our data to provide even greater visibility into our capacity utilization. We've also made investments in advancing our supply planning to assist in our internal distribution decisions. The third area of focus is our Design for Excellence initiatives, where we are working with our business units to further incorporate design for resiliency and design for sustainability as standards for new product design, and wherever possible, redesign. These inputs really represent an improvement in our product development process beyond what we do today.
This increased flexibility will also amplify our resiliency as we can reduce our exposure in areas where supply is limited. We expect that our capacity expansion initiatives will add incremental capacity to support an additional $500 million of revenue every quarter. We acknowledge that in the near term, our customer service levels will remain heavily dependent upon component availability, but we know that we will successfully execute these transformational initiatives over the next 12 months. Our capacity expansion initiatives will enable Rockwell Automation to overcome several of the supply chain challenges that we face today and will set us up for strong growth in the years to come. Thanks, and back to you, Blake.
You know, we've always talked about how culture and our people are at the foundation of our success, and I think it's important to spend some time in a setting like this and talk about specifically what we're doing in those areas. I've asked Becky House to join me on stage. She's our Chief People Officer and is also responsible for our sustainability efforts within the company. Becky.
Thanks much, Blake. I'm really happy to be here with you today to spend some time talking about our sustainability strategy, which is founded on our culture. You know, sustainability has always been important to us. It's the heart of our company promise and central to the value that we've been delivering for more than 100 years. Our sustainability strategy is informed by our culture and the four culture tenets that we've identified and been explaining to our organization for the last number of years. It's also informed by and based on our business strategy, because our sustainability commitments are both inward-looking and outward-facing. Ultimately, what we're looking to drive through our commitment to sustainability is three outcomes: creating a sustainable company, sustainable communities, and sustainable customers. It starts with our sustainable company, and the beginning of that is our people.
As Blake said, we know our people are the foundation of our success, so we wanna create an environment and a culture where all people can and want to do their very best work. You know, Blake mentioned earlier about the alignment across our integrated business objectives to make sure we're focused on the most important things. Included in those objectives is making progress on our culture tenets, because we know that they're critically important to our business success. Important, in fact, that we've tied our executive compensation to making progress on them. We're making progress by investing in our people, right?
It starts with putting 24,000 of our employees through culture workshops, where they're not only connecting what they do every day with the company's purpose and how they can influence our culture, but also so they can understand how and why our culture tenets like increasing our speed of decision-making and having a steady stream of fresh ideas are critically important to delivering more value to our customers. Those culture workshops are only one part of our skill development and training program that we have for our employees. Over the last year, they've logged tens of thousands of training hours on everything from leadership development to building technical competencies like software development and program and project management. Another critically important part of our culture is the escalation of our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Now, we've got a solid foundation for this work 'cause we've been focused on it for the last decade, but we know we need to do more, and we need to act faster. Our new Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer, with input from our board, has partnered with each and every one of our executive leaders to develop specific plans for how they can and will increase the gender and racial diversity on their global teams. We wanna make sure that our culture is an inclusive one, where every person has opportunities to contribute, grow, and develop. We've had 300 of our most senior leaders go through training on how to sponsor diverse talent, how to lead across differences, and they're now putting that training to work. Of course, we continue to be focused on the total well-being of our employees.
As we've seen through the last couple of years, health and safety, including mental health, are really, really important to having a well-functioning workforce. We're really proud that we continue to have a strong commitment to safety and have delivered a best-in-class employee safety record for over a decade. Of course, creating a sustainable company also means we have to be focused on our environmental impact. You'll recall that last year, we announced our new carbon- neutral goal around scope one and two emissions after we had achieved our prior emissions reduction target four years early. I'm really happy to say we're making progress. Our Poland manufacturing complex is now powered by 100% renewable energy, and in the last year, we invested in over a dozen energy reduction and renewable energy projects, and we're using our own technology to do it.
We've leveraged our FactoryTalk software portfolio in our manufacturing facilities to eliminate paper job packets. What does that mean? That means we reduced more than 250,000 pounds of paper waste. That equates to reducing our carbon footprint by 50,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent. Next, we're also creating sustainable communities. Every single year, we donate millions of dollars in cash and in-kind technology towards STEM education, equity and inclusion, talent engagement, and disaster relief and recovery. But even more impactful than those donations is the work that our people are doing in their communities every single day. We enable and encourage our employees to get involved in their communities to have a positive impact, including through our partnerships with organizations like FIRST, which inspires kids to be the science and technology leaders of the future.
Over the last 5 years, more than 1,500 of our employees around the world have dedicated countless hours, as well as their passion , excitement, and expertise, to working with kids as mentors and coaches through FIRST programs. In India, our employees partnered with Habitat for Humanity this last year to deliver solar-powered LED lights and fans to 550 low-income homes that had no power before . Finally, sustainable customers. Everything we do is about making our customers more sustainable. It's how we're uniquely positioned to really have an exponential impact on the world around us. We're delivering new offerings and expanded capabilities across our entire portfolio to target sustainability outcomes. We're focused on energy reduction, smart water solutions, and waste management and recycling.
By combining our technology with deep domain expertise across discrete, hybrid, and process industries, we're helping our customers achieve their own sustainability goals. Those of you who had an opportunity to tour the automation show floor earlier today saw some really great examples of how we're doing that through products like our FactoryTalk Energy Manager. That's our contemporary industrial energy management software solution that's putting energy data in context with production data to reduce energy use. You heard from George earlier about Kalypso Strategic Consulting Services. They're helping customers identify their best sustainability opportunities by leveraging insights from enterprise data and optimizing end-to-end operations. You know, our solutions are delivering real results for our customers.
A Spanish waste processing plant used our controls, drives, and software to double its capacity to recycle and quadruple the amount of material it could transfer to other recycling facilities. We're working with a major tire customer to help reduce the amount of energy it takes to manufacture every single tire that's rolling off their lines. We're providing a single integrated platform that can handle enterprise-scale infrastructure at different digital maturity levels and provide industrial asset management, delivering immediate time to value. You know, I think you could see our focus on customer sustainability is not only helping have a positive impact on the world, but it really is providing whole new ways for us to win across all industries.
Yeah. You know, thanks, Becky. You know, one of the, in addition to the great examples that Becky just talked about, First Solar, a manufacturer of photovoltaic cells, PV cells for solar energy, recently announced two plants, one in Ohio and one near Chennai, India. Rockwell's been a long- time provider to First Solar, but we've increased the scope of that partnership, and we're very proud to be playing an even larger role in helping First Solar lead the world's sustainable energy future across a broad part of our portfolio. These are all examples of how we're helping our customers and really the world become more sustainable. Thanks.
Thank you.
You know, with that, I'm gonna ask Nick to give us an update on our financials. We'll turn it over to Nick to talk about that area.
Thanks, Blake. Good afternoon. It's great to be here to share an update on our finances and investments. As Blake mentioned, we believe we are in the early stages of a multi-year growth cycle, and demand for our products has never been more important. Today, you've seen and heard about the priorities we have for current and coming years. It's important that our investment funding and capital allocation is aligned with these goals. The Rockwell finance team and I have worked to be sure we are funding investments that align with these priorities, have strong returns, and drive accelerated, profitable growth. If you look at the high- level breakdown of our investment spend in fiscal year 2022, you can see that the vast majority is focused on spending most directly aligned with growth.
Our investments in R&D, sales and marketing, and other growth investments to expand our capacity are all expected to grow mid-teens in fiscal year 2022. At the same time, spending in our support functions will grow, but will continue to decrease as a percentage of sales. I'm going to go one click deeper in sharing more specifics on what we are investing in. I'll start at the bottom of this slide with our growth investments in core, where we are targeting to grow twice as fast as industrial production. These investments include sales and marketing, where we are enhancing our industry expertise, expanding sales coverage in Europe and Asia, and increasing the number of quota-carrying sales resources. In R&D for core, we are investing in product development, industry-specific solutions, and sustainability. In the supply chain, we are investing in capacity expansion.
Moving up to ISCS, where we are targeting double-digit organic growth, we are investing in digital consultants and information solution sales specialists. In R&D, we are investing in SaaS capabilities, cybersecurity technology and expertise, and we are also investing in the digital infrastructure to support our growth in annual recurring revenue. To close out this slide, our most recent acquisitions and joint ventures are expected to contribute over $1.1 billion in revenue by 2025, and we continue to target 1% or more of inorganic growth through additional acquisitions in the coming years. Our long-term financial framework remains the same. Our 30%-35% earnings conversion leads to continued margin expansion. 100% free cash flow conversion generates capital deployment flexibility and resiliency. Our strong balance sheet positions us with additional capacity for strategic capital deployment.
Earnings per share growing faster than revenue, plus return on invested capital greater than 20%, is driven by disciplined capital deployment. We've previously laid out our capital deployment framework, and there's no change to our long-term capital deployment priorities. Funding our organic opportunities remains a top priority. Second, we plan to deploy capital inorganically to add a point or more of growth per year. Our framework also lays out our expectation to return cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. We continue to have a strong capital structure. We are planning another year of over $1 billion of free cash flow generation in fiscal year 2022, and we plan on reducing our debt-to-EBITDA ratio to approximately 2.5 x by the end of our fiscal year, with a focus on deleveraging.
As we did in fiscal year 2021 with our acquisition of Plex, we remain flexible to increase leverage to 3.5x debt to EBITDA for strategic acquisitions. I'll wrap up with the fiscal year 2022 guidance we shared last week. We expect revenue of greater than $8 billion and 150 basis points of margin expansion, leading to earnings per share between $10.50 and $11.10. Our strong order momentum and backlog growth are supportive of our strong growth outlook in fiscal year 2022 and beyond. With that, let me turn it back to Blake.
You know, another thing that I'm very proud of is the way that the finance team, led by Nick and all the talented professionals in that organization, are really serving as partners to the businesses and the functions in our plans to accelerate that profitable growth. In closing, and before we turn it over to Q&A, let me highlight, I think, what I believe are a few of the most important points from the presentation. First, automation is vitally important. It is a necessity in so many of the industries that we serve. We have high differentiation and readiness to serve in some of the highest growth verticals within the market. We believe that we're in the early stages of a period of multiyear economic expansion, and so we're investing to maximize our participation in that economic expansion.
We've demonstrated, and we continue to increase our own resilience with annual recurring revenue growing materially as a part of our overall sales, with strong plans to increase that further. Then finally, and broadly, we really are taking manufacturing to a whole new level as we're helping our customers be more resilient, agile, and sustainable. We believe that nobody is better positioned to provide this value at that intersection of information and operational technology. With that, I'll ask Nick to join me on the stage, and we'll take your questions. I think we have the mic runners.
Well, we're gonna do it from here, Blake.
Yes.
Okay. We'll do it through the portal. If everyone can submit their questions. If we don't get to your questions through the portal, I'll make sure that there's time at the end where we can have a mic runner come and get your questions if you can't get onto the portal. We're gonna try for the portal first, because we wanna give the virtual audience an opportunity.
Great.
All right. First question. Sustainability and cybersecurity were prominent on the show floor. Why is Rockwell the partner of choice? Are competitors mostly OT, and how big can these be over the next several years?
Well, we heard Yaniv talk this morning on cybersecurity as being all in, you know, a market that could be $20 billion just on the OT side. There are many facets to that, but as you also heard from the panel this morning, and as we've seen in our own discussions with customers, they're looking for somebody to sort out the different aspects of cybersecurity. We think Rockwell is proving a differentiation by having our own capabilities, the acquisitions that we've made in that space, the CapEx investments with the cybersecurity operations center that's now online, and with great partners like Claroty and others. I think that Rockwell is proving, you know, in the field of battle, that we are the partner of choice.
You heard about the example this morning, where even when we don't have the installed base of the core automation, we're still winning, and we're winning against the incumbent suppliers of that automation. I think we're doing some things right there. In terms of sustainability, you know, when we talk about sustainable customers, there are a couple of aspects to sustainability. You heard Becky talk about our focus on energy, water, and waste. Some of those are horizontal across virtually all customers, where, you know, all manufacturers or all producers, regardless of what vertical industry they're in, can use our technology and our services to increase their own sustainability. There's also, in terms of the energy production itself, of course, solar is a good example of that in terms of photovoltaics, the work we're doing with wind energy, and so on.
There are opportunities to play vertical-s pecific roles. Water treatment has been a traditional, very strong industry for us. You've heard me talk about that as a regular, you know, growth contributor in places like China, for instance, and then also in terms of renewables. I think our breadth of coverage, our increased focus even beyond what it's been in the past, and our understanding of how you help customers become the best stewards of the water, air, gas, electricity, and steam, all the inputs to energy that we're helping them be better stewards of.
Please talk about your competitive advantages in serving the EV industry versus competitors. What would a company building an electric vehicle factory need to purchase from Rockwell in hardware and software? And what is the revenue opportunity per factory?
Sure. Let's start with the things that are common for an electric vehicle manufacturer, and a manufacturer of internal combustion vehicles, cars , trucks, buses, and so on. You know, you're still in either operation, somewhere you're gonna have to stamp the metal, and you're gonna have to paint it, and you're gonna have to assemble the components, the seats and the windshields and the doors, you know, into a vehicle. In addition, what's different about the electric vehicle is the battery assembly, right? There's the basic process of putting, you know, that's largely a process application for batteries. Then there's the assembly and the packaging of the batteries.
That's maybe the first point of differentiation that I would highlight is that independent cart technology has really become state-of-the-art across the world for that battery assembly, whether you're in Korea or China or the U.S., it really has become an essential component of that. The second piece that I'll point out is the evolution of the use of manufacturing execution software to a have-to-have in these newer facilities, these newer EV facilities for vehicle scheduling. It used to be kind of a nice- to- have. A lot of companies were trying to roll their own in terms of, you know, doing it yourself, for this MES software. They've really recognized that working with an established provider is important.
Again, we are regularly beating our biggest competitors out there because we have a better solution, and we have the application know-how to be able to provide that. Finally, you know, we have a great installed base in those traditional applications within EV that I talked about. So we know a lot about the paint booth, the body shop, and vehicle test, the trim chassis, and the final. I mean, these were huge parts of Rockwell's total business when I started, and while through diversification they become a little less of a percentage of our total, that's not because we lost that knowledge in terms of how to put a vehicle together.
I'm gonna combine the next two questions together 'cause they're related. How do you get comfortable with order conversion in fiscal 2022, given supply chain and labor shortages?
Yeah. Well, we took a lot of factors into account. Let me just mention a few of them. First of all, the labor in our plants. I think by being a good destination to work at, as well as making sure that we've got competitive compensation and that we have a safe environment, we have largely addressed, you know, the catch- up in terms of the labor as we recovered out of the lockdowns. We feel like we've done a very good job, but we have to continue to earn, you know, that position as a destination of choice in the markets in which we're conducting our manufacturing.
We have considered the broad portfolio of suppliers and their current commitments, as well as, you know, factoring in the fact that there are some unknown unknowns that will certainly creep in over the next year in coming up with our guidance in terms of being able to ship that backlog and also with respect to the fact that orders continue at a strong pace. You know, it's a fairly complex algorithm, but we've spent a lot of time looking at that. I should add that even at the top end of our guidance range, that still assumes continuing supply chain constraints to some extent. Nick, anything to add to that?
No, the components will be one of the things that have been taken into account. Blake, you really summed it up well. I'll just repeat what Blake said there. Even at the high end of our guidance range, we anticipate by the end of fiscal year 2022, we will still be facing supply chain constraints.
Next question. Kalypso. Is Kalypso a meaningfully profitable business for Rockwell, or is it used more to pull through Rockwell products and enhance the end customer relationship?
Yeah. I'm happy to say that Kalypso is one of those that does both of those things. You know, we talk about free cash flow conversion as an important test of the profitability and the evolution of our acquisitions. I'm happy to say that Kalypso is doing just fine in that department on its own merit. When you look at the synergy, then you look at the types of conversations that they help us, you know, establish thought leadership in at the biggest companies in the world, and the innovation that they're leading at those companies in terms of creating digital twins in terms of pulling all these different pieces together, the software and the base automation products, being able to quantify what a customer should expect, that expertise is recognized far and wide by our customers, by our competitors, and it's showing up in terms of our results.
I will also say, just as a comment, you know, a pretty eloquent way to gauge the value of an acquisition is the kind of pull that it creates, or is fostered, within our sales force. You wouldn't believe the kind of demand that our sales force is creating on Kalypso. It's basically become an integral part of our sales motion in those types of opportunities where you have Kalypso coming in with that expertise, shoulder to shoulder with the account manager who understands the plumbing, if you will, of that account and their ecosystem. It's a combination that I wouldn't bet against.
Blake, it seems like there might be a little bit of confusion as to when you're pegging the $9 billion revenue number. Some people think it might be in 2025 that you're saying that. Can you maybe just clarify for the room?
For those of you who got the ruler out on that chart with the stacked bars, you would notice that in 2025, that bar went up well above the $9 billion mark. What we're saying is that we expect to hit and exceed $9 billion in the next two to three years. Think of that as fiscal 2023 or 2024.
Thank you, Blake. You talked a lot about go-to-market strategy, but could you give more color on where you are in terms of the build-out of that strategy, given all of the new capabilities you bought over the last few years? How does it vary by geography?
Yeah. Well, I think it's a good question because it's a combination of our organic work to add new resources with those skills. It's also about our ability to integrate the resources that are coming to us through acquisition. Plex has a great sales force. It's primarily been focused on North America, and so a lot of activity in that particular area is to make sure that we can turn on our sales resources in Europe and in Asia, being able to hire additional resources, 'cause that was an important part of the synergy associated with that acquisition. I think we have good efforts in all geographies.
To highlight a couple, China, we've given them the capabilities to reinvest some of the over-performance there so that we can continue to fuel the increasing acceleration of growth in China. In Europe, as I mentioned, some of the acquisitions are contributing to that, ASEM being an example where ASEM continues to go to market to German and Italian OEMs with the ASEM brand with their sales force. So there are differences based on, as the questioner called out in geography and offering, but it's both an organic and an inorganic approach. I should say, you know, marketing is part of that equation as well.
I mentioned before that a high-velocity selling organization does a lot more virtually, and so it's not just about a linear approach to having to hire a salesperson, you know, every $2 million or $3 million or $4 million or $10 million of incremental revenue. There's efficiencies there that we're learning more and more about, and we intend to turn on across the system.
This is a related question to that. It seems like there is a focus on combining Rockwell's mature technology with some of the recent inorganic investments like Plex and Fiix, and go to market with industry solutions. Why now, and what are the benefits of this strategy?
If you're a customer in a particular industry, you want your problems addressed. You don't want you know, we call a bag of rocks internally, or, you know, a bunch of disparate building blocks without a blueprint as to how these pieces come together to address particular pain points in that customer. That's going to be a set of existing products that we have in terms of the base automation. It's gonna be software that's trusted and proven over a long period of time in many cases. Then it's the new capabilities that we have, either through the services or the new products that we have, or the new software. Knitting those together into solutions that address the high volume, high frequency use cases specific to each industry is a really important thing.
That pivot to industry is a proxy, if you will, for customer centricity. Because when you're focused on what are the pain points to build electric vehicles or to produce vaccines or to package food in, you know, lot sizes of one, then you're paying attention from the outside in, and that's a fundamental part of the culture that we're evolving to, as opposed to one that's predicated purely on incremental improvements to what you already have. That's an important part of it. I should add to that.
You know, one of Cyril's responsibilities as CTO is to put additional rigor into this business of putting together repeatable packaged IP. The reusable solutions that combine existing products as well as new products, software, and services to make sure that we have a consistent way to go to market with that, to be able to support it after it's sold. That's an important part of Cyril's new responsibilities.
Nick, this is going to touch, I think, a bit of what you talked about in your segment. Some industrial technology and software companies invest 15%-16% of sales in R&D annually to keep up with tech innovation. Do you believe you'll have to increase your spend to that degree on a more structural basis as opposed to just in 2021, 2022?
I don't think we'll have to move our research and development up to that level of spending. That said, when you look at where we moved from 2021 to 2022, categories like R&D, we're seeing a mid-teen percent increase, and we're doing that based on the types of opportunities and the sense of urgency we have in bringing those solutions to our customers. I think we do have opportunities to see some increases in future years, but I don't see it getting to the level that the question implies.
The other comment I would make to that is, you know, with a diverse offering aimed at producing these solutions, there's gonna be a considerable amount of variability in terms of the percentage, you know, as a percent of sales in different products and software offerings and so on. It's gonna be variable across our portfolio. Nick and I spend a lot of time with our business leaders, with our customer-facing resources, looking at the requests to determine which ones are gonna have the biggest impact. It's not entirely fair, but I think it gives us an efficient use of our resources in terms of picking where we deploy.
This question is related to orders. What were the total orders in 2019? I'm assuming the question's really kind of getting after how is it comparing to now. The question was about 2019 and how orders were then, I'm assuming, versus now.
I'm gonna take a guess here that orders were south of $6 billion, and orders for us in fiscal year 2021 were $8.2 billion. Just to put it in perspective.
Yeah, significantly up even over fiscal year 2019 and obviously way up compared to fiscal year 2020.
This question's on PTC. It appears you are willing to sell down some of the stake in PTC, but that seems at odds with PTC's underpinning of the digital thread and previous comments of a strong relationship. What is the status of the relationship and your go-forward plans?
Yeah. The relationship with PTC is as strong as ever, full stop. You saw Jim Heppelmann last night. We are very excited about the opportunities together to grow that business and, you know, we're seeing even greater adoption, really, across geographies and across industries. Let me recap what I've talked about before in terms of the three main areas that we expect to monetize the relationship with PTC. The first is the resale of their technology, and as I said, that's been the focus, the commercial relationship, that ability to move faster, to be able to add more value, continues to be proven out. The second is the pull-through, and I'm including in that pull-through the ability to play a larger, earlier role in our customers' digital transformation opportunities.
You know, when George was talking about, you know, creating those digital twins, if for some of you who follow PTC as well, you would hear a lot of those similar concepts with PTC, and they're a very good partner to us in that respect. Finally, it's the appreciation of our capital investment, and we're happy that it's in the money, so we're trimming that position. I expect to stay on the PTC board. I'll be there next week at their board meeting. We think that our recent acquisitions are complementary to what we have with PTC. PTC has said the same thing.
Great. With that, I'm gonna now turn it over to Aijana to take a few more questions from the in-person audience.
Thanks a lot. Julian Mitchell. Maybe just one thing that's become clear, I think, the last couple of years is you've reevaluated some big strategic concepts that you had previously. PLM, you became sort of more enamored with it in the last couple of years versus five or ten years ago. Cloud-based software, you've also become more keen on versus an on-premise bias before. You know, I'm just wondering, sort of give some context as to how your strategic thoughts evolved on those two points. And then what are the other main topics right now that you're evaluating strategically in terms of where do we go next? Customers are telling us this, but we've been doing it that way. Anything like that we should be aware of?
Yeah, sure. Well, you know, I think the idea of having both on-prem and cloud-based solutions is an element of openness. You know, 10 years ago, we talked about open, and primarily we issued as a proof point, you know, open Ethernet, unmodified Ethernet communications for data, you know, versus other customized networks. While that's still valid, and we're still the leader in that respect, a lot now is about the open exchange of data and also being able to meet a customer where they are on their journey. We have a lot of customers who are very happy with on-prem software solutions, and I'll take MES 'cause we have both on-prem and cloud-based offerings.
They may be in a validated environment where even if they wanted to change, they couldn't move their big plants over to, you know, another type of offering because they can't touch it. Once it's validated, they wanna keep it running in exactly the same configuration. We're happy to support, for a long time, those deployments. On the other hand, you might have a smaller customer that doesn't have an IT department that can maintain the computing surfaces required for an on-prem installation, and they like the ease of deployment, the ease of management of a cloud-native solution. We're gonna offer that. It's about that flexibility.
Technology has evolved from when we made those statements that were more biased towards on-prem, but we continue to support on-prem. Giving those choices to meet the customer where they are in their journey, I think, is an important contemporary element of what it is to be open, which is a differentiator, I believe, for Rockwell versus a lot of our other competitors.
Blake, labor shortages, you know, and kind of the inflation therein are hugely topical. You talked about it in your own experience , you know, retention in that. As customers come to you with new projects, how much of their ambition is removing labor from the system as a function of that, versus, you know, some kind of broader mandate? Like, is that driving a conversation or is it more of a byproduct and, you know, the solution kind of manifests, however it makes most sense?
I think it's more about the efficient use of labor. You know, in a lot of the industries that we serve, you know, the easy take-outs of, you know, manual, repetitive, dangerous work, you know, have been done. In a lot of the industries that we're serving, automation is absolutely required and has been. You can't build a car manually, right? You just can't do it. You can't produce 8 billion doses of vaccine a year, manually. There's a high degree of automation, but being able to use people more effectively to be able to support multiple lines, so cross-training and the ability to use the technology to provide flexible scheduling and quick changeover.
There may still be people involved, and Cyril talked about it, you know, even in the move to autonomous control, but it's utilizing workers for their highest, best value. The straight replacement of, you know, manual labor, I don't think is at the top of the list, you know, in itself, for what's driving the investments we're seeing. It's about capacity. It's about new lines of business. It's about better efficiency and throughput. It's those sorts of things that people are concentrating on. It's about, you know, localizing their manufacturing for consumer markets. You know, you know I don't like talking about reshoring. I talk about shoring. People are just looking at building that capacity in redundancy or, you know, closer to certain consumer markets.
We're gonna take one final question.
All right, I'll try to make it a good one. Noah Kaye with Oppenheimer. Hey, Blake.
There you go.
I think early in the presentation, you mentioned capacity expansion plans to support a $500 million higher quarterly revenue run rate. Can you elaborate on some of the focus areas for that expansion? How much of that is physical expansion versus utilizing some of the tools you've showcased for increasing throughput? Any parameters you can give us around expected timing and required investment?
Yeah. Well, we are confident that we have the additional capacity in place to support our plan. You know, that's the first important point when we talk about the path to $9 billion and beyond. We're confident that we're putting these in place. We've already started with many of these. You know, it's a mix of the labor that we're bringing, you know, making sure that we're, you know, getting to full strength, that we're adding additional training so that, you know, the people that we do have are as capable as possible. There's physical capacity, so there's surface mount machines that we've added in the system around the world. It is those tools. It's not just, you know, the on-the-floor automation. It's also about supply chain planning.
You know, it's no coincidence that one of the things that attracted us to Plex is their capabilities in that area, in terms of supply chain planning. Those tools to get better visibility of what we have and what we need to have better interfaces with our own suppliers, that's an important part of the capacity enhancements that will drive that capability.
Noah, if I'm getting your question too, you're kind of also asking about kind of calendarization, how to think about that over the course of the year. Nick, is there anything that you can maybe add for Noah on that front?
Yeah. Just in terms of the investments that we've been making, those started in 2021 and are continuing into 2022. That's already in place and going with momentum. In terms of adding the second part , I'm not sure what we talked about. This isn't expanding the square footage of our manufacturing sites. We can do it within the footprints we have today. Then finally, in terms of increasing it, this internal capacity we have, that's an increase each quarter that we're planning as we progress throughout 2022.
Yeah.
That's it for the Q&A portion. Blake, any final remarks?
Well, let me first say thank you. You know, under still challenging circumstances, we're very happy with the turnout and the interest that you have in our story. I'm very proud of what we've done, what our people have done. I'm even more excited about what's to come over the next year and the years beyond. Limitless opportunities, we talked about some of them today, with a detailed plan to get there. Thank you so much and safe travels to everybody.