The Power of OMRON’s Sysmac Studio: Unify Automation and Integrate Safety
November 7, 2025
By Omron Automation
Industry moves fast. Outpace obsolescence with OMRON’s Sysmac Studio. Designed to empower operations from the edge to the cloud, it unifies automation by prioritizing safety and security. Built for today, ready for the future.
Today, the factory floor faces pressure from suppliers, consumers, competition, and emerging technologies. Operation teams are looking to remain competitive while making resilience standard procedure. At the crux of resilience and a sustainable competitive advantage is confident decisions driven by data-based insight. OMRON’s Sysmac Studio does just that, enabling processes to run predictably, effectively, and hit their output targets, especially when that target is moving.
A Data-First Mindset
Predictable, repeatable, and stable processes can benefit from automation at any scale, and a metric driven methodology magnifies the impact. Taking a data-first approach – prioritizing holistic, context rich, and timely process signals – is paramount as this data is the currency that builds the wealth that creates a resilient and efficient factory floor. Holistic data eliminates blind spots, removing tunnel vision commonly resulting in symptoms treated rather than root causes. Context rich data converges trends, history, and changes to create action rather than ambiguity in team huddles. Latency in data collection creates missed opportunities, removing hindsight bias from past production runs.
Building From Data Collection
Imagine this: a large facility with several pieces of equipment and machinery uses a vision system to help automate parts of the workflow. Without an obvious reason, the vision system would malfunction, and crash, but no one could figure out why.
This facility introduced OMRON’s Sysmac Studio, unified every device on the floor (vision, temperature sensors, safety, and motion devices), and was able to discover the root cause. It turns out that on nice days, workers would open the bay doors, and the sunlight streaming in would affect the light sensors. Would that be your first guess if this happened in your operation?
Another example: another manufacturer has several machines on their factory floor that are controlled by a single PLC (programmable logic controller), and problems started to occur on the second and third shift. Their team began to use an OMRON PLC that had playback (15 minutes pre-and post-event), to record the automation and try to identify the problem. However, they were only getting bits and pieces of the issue because of limited playback and network protocols with just a controller.
Shifting to Sysmac Studio enabled them to record everything simultaneously, discover the root cause, and unify their work culture to be more data-driven and less task-orientated. Does your process take a data-first approach, or is it more task-oriented, where you only see pieces but not the whole picture?
Unifying Automation Means Creating a Whole Picture
Seeing the whole picture drives operational decisions and enhances system performance. Data is driving IIoT, where physical devices are connected to a network of communication protocols that provide real-time insights, analytics, machine learning, and AI. OMRON’s Sysmac Studio has been designed to integrate control, connection, and software into one platform to optimize automation across industries.
Turning back to that last example, that manufacturer quickly realized that Sysmac Studio could not only use that data to check pre and postmortems. They were able to better understand how operators interacted with the machines, get them back up and running when there were issues, and replicate these activities at multiple sites. An added benefit was that they were able to troubleshoot and commission machines and products quicker and more cost effectively. As well as it could help with machine learning and generative AI as next steps.
Data is key, because without good, quality data, it will be impossible to track performance and identity key performance indicators (KPIs) that correlate to success. For the more advanced technology groups, Sysmac Studio can help them control that device data, analyze it to meet set KPIs, and identify those reward functions for future reinforced learning. Other platforms might focus on control or communication, but OMRON’s Sysmac Studio unifies the entire automation, while integrating safety.
Safety and Security Prioritized
Safety and security are equally important for operator safety and network resilience for Sysmac. Looking at operator safety, Sysmac integrates a vast number of scanners, light curtains, or rope pulls into its ecosystem over high-speed protocols. Allowing safety to always to function as designed and be designed at the highest ISO standards. Going one step further, OMRON makes it easy for operator safety to be scaled with plug-and-play simplicity. Safety CPUs (central processing units) on an NX controller can be scaled by adding more connections, or CIP (common industrial protocol) safety can be flipped to Fail-Safe over EtherCAT (FSoE) if response times are a priority.
Turning to network security, OMRON has integrated every secure protocol you would expect as standard: OPC UA (open platform communications unified architecture), SQL (structured query language), and MQTT (message queuing telemetry transport) protocols that are proven and in compliance with global industry standards. Moreover, from the UL and IEC perspectives, new standards are being updated all the time, and OMRON allocates significant R&D to ensure they are up to date. For instance, OMRON has already laid out the roadmap to ensure that Sysmac products will all check the boxes of the European Union’s Cyber Resiliency Act coming into effect in 2027.
Process Proven then Factory Scale
The journey can and should begin with a single confident step; not a series of leaps outpacing a factory culture and assets to magnify its weaknesses. Whether it is an OMRON NX series of PLCs, NY series of IPCs, or DX series of data collectors, each are all designed to meet factories competitive requirements today while preparing for the factory floor for its next step. Start using Sysmac today to go from no data to unified architecture. Setting a pace works for you, even if it outpaces the competition.
