Two appointed to board of directors for industrial device group

FDT Group announced that Paul Brooks, manager, technology business development, strategic development for Rockwell Automation; and Rolf Birkhofer, managing director for Endress+Hauser digital solutions, have been voted in by the FDT Group member community to serve in leadership roles on the FDT Board of Directors.

The FDT Group Board of Directors sets the executive strategy for the organization and provides governance over the open FDT standard, which directly benefits the global manufacturing automation industries with a unified environment for industrial device management and IT/OT data-driven operations for the process and discrete markets supporting smart manufacturing, efficiency, and sustainability initiatives.

Brooks and Birkhofer replaced board members Lee Lane, Rockwell Automation; and Francois Ichtertz, Endress+Hauser, respectively, due to their departure to new roles. They join existing board members including Andre Uhl, Schneider Electric; Michael Kessler, PACTware; Shinji Oda, Yokogawa; and Ed Silva, Flowserve Corporation.

“We appreciate the service Lee Lane and Francois Ichtertz provided to our organization. Paul Brooks and Rolf Birkhofer bring a wealth of process and factory automation industry experience to their new posts on our board,” said FDT Group managing director Steve Biegacki in a press release. “They will play an important role in guiding the FDT Group organization and FDT/DTM technology roadmap through collaborative initiatives focused on innovation and differentiation that deliver new value to customers.”

Brooks has more than 30 years of experience in the industrial market and currently leads the commercial & technical teams responsible for the strategy around open aspects of the Rockwell Automation System Architecture. This includes Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and Field Xchange (FX) strategy, EtherNet/IP development, network architecture, 5G direction, and application orchestration. He was a member of FDT Joint Interest Group (JIG) in 2003, recognizes the importance of FDT in the market as the preferred integration standard for UAFX, and is committed to fostering market insights and relationships to allow FDT to develop in parallel with communication technologies to enable innovation.

Birkhofer’s near 20-year career in industrial automation stems from his Electrical Engineering background and managing director roles at CodeWrights and Endress+Hauser. Currently overseeing digital solutions for process applications at Endress+Hauser, he is deeply involved with technology standards groups including advanced physical layer (APL), device descriptions (DD), field device integration (FDI) and FDT/DTM.

– Edited from an FDT Group press release by CFE Media and Technology. FDT Group is a CFE Media and Technology content partner.

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