Most of what an engineer learns about a new product arrives secondhand — a spec sheet, a webinar, a sales call, a datasheet skimmed between two other tasks. You rarely get to put your hands on the hardware, watch it run, and ask the person who built it the question that’s actually on your mind. That gap is exactly what we set out to close.
On June 2, 2026, HESCO hosted our first-ever Technology Showcase at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Connecticut. It was part customer appreciation event, part working demonstration floor, and part classroom — a chance to get our customers in the same room as the technology partners shaping today’s manufacturing and automation landscape, and to let everyone get hands-on with hardware and software that’s genuinely new. More than 25 vendors exhibited, four educational sessions ran throughout the afternoon, and roughly 200 people came through the doors. This article recaps the day and walks through what each of the four sessions covered — with deeper standalone articles on each topic to follow.
HESCO has spent more than 85 years connecting customers with the right automation and electrical technology. But there’s a limit to what a line card and a catalog can convey. Some products you have to see running to understand — a collaborative robot easing through a pick-and-place cycle inches from a person, a laser marking system inspecting its own work before a part ever leaves the enclosure, a data platform pulling live information off a controller and turning it into something a plant manager can act on.
So we built a day around that idea. The goal was simple: bring our vendor partners and our customers into one room, give people genuine hands-on time with new technology, and pair the demo floor with short, practical educational sessions that go a level deeper than a product pitch. We also opened the doors to a few local trade schools and universities, because the same skills gap our customers feel every day starts with connecting emerging talent to the industry.
The educational sessions ran hourly, and while each stood on its own, a common thread tied them together: the hardest problems in automation right now aren’t about any single machine. They’re about people, data, and the spaces in between — finding the workforce to run the line, getting useful information off equipment that was never designed to share it, proving quality in a regulated process, and knowing a failure is coming before it takes the line down. Here’s what each session covered.
The day’s robotics session opened with a problem every attendee recognized: there aren’t enough people to do the work, and the math is only getting harder. Citing figures from the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), the presenter walked through the labor pressures driving collaborative robot adoption — a shrinking under-30 workforce, rising wage demands, and millions of manufacturing jobs projected to go unfilled by the end of the decade. The framing throughout was that cobots don’t replace people; they unlock automation for tasks that were never automated before, and they free up workers to take on higher-value roles.
From there, the session got into what actually separates a collaborative robot from a traditional industrial one — onboard safety and collision sensing, lightweight design, and a modern, approachable programming environment built on tools today’s graduates already know. The presenter covered where cobots fit best (repetitive, repeatable tasks across machine tending, palletizing, assembly, sanding and polishing, inspection, and pick-and-place), how to think about ROI and payback, and the practical questions to ask before deploying — payload, reach, cycle time, floor space, and whether the parts and process are consistent enough to automate. The Doosan–Rockwell Automation partnership came up as well, with the two platforms designed to integrate cleanly.
This Rockwell Automation session reframed how many attendees think about FactoryTalk Optix. Rather than pitching it purely as an HMI or SCADA package to replace what you already run, the presenter made the case for Optix as a data platform — a tool for collecting, contextualizing, and moving machine data into the places where it drives decisions. The backdrop was the broader shift toward smart manufacturing: plants now have so many networked, data-generating devices that the real challenge isn’t collecting information, it’s organizing it and putting it to use.
The session walked through Rockwell’s data-ready libraries (a free, reusable set of tools for surfacing things like overall equipment effectiveness, maintenance events, and energy data), the consistency of faceplates and code across HMI platforms, and the low-cost edge devices that can act as headless data pumps — pulling tags from Rockwell and non-Rockwell controllers alike and pushing them out via OPC UA, MQTT, or SQL. Remote access came up as a recurring theme too: secure VPN connectivity baked into the hardware, so an OEM or integrator can see, support, and deploy to devices around the globe without rolling a truck. A point worth underscoring from the session: adopting Optix doesn’t mean ripping out your existing HMIs — it can run alongside what you already have.
The FOBA session tackled a requirement that’s become non-negotiable in industries like medical and aerospace: traceability. Every part tracked, every mark verified, every regulatory box checked. The presenters’ central argument was that laser marking shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought bolted onto the end of a process — especially when, in a high-value medical part, marking is often the last step before cleaning, which means a marking error can scrap a part that already has significant cost built into it.
The answer FOBA presented is a holistic approach — marketed as HELP (Holistic Enhanced Laser Process) — that wraps the mark itself in an integrated vision system. Before marking, the system verifies it’s the correct part, confirms the part wasn’t already marked, and aligns the mark to the part’s actual position. After marking, it verifies content is present, can run optical character verification, and can validate 2D codes like data matrix and UDI marks against grading standards. The session also covered the M-series platform, multi-level marking through the optics (no mechanical Z-axis movement), batch marking for throughput, and FOBA’s application-lab model, where engineers test a customer’s actual parts and issue an application report before recommending a solution.
The maintenance session, led by Dr. Brian Romano of The Arthur G. Russell Company, traced the evolution from traditional preventive maintenance toward predictive and prescriptive strategies. His starting point was familiar to every attendee: the workforce that knows the line is retiring, the skills gap is widening, and the person who understands the equipment best often isn’t there at 2 a.m. when something breaks. Traditional time- and usage-based maintenance still has value, but it leans heavily on human expertise and frequently leads to over-maintenance — servicing equipment on a schedule whether it needs it or not.
The session laid out the four maintenance types — usage-based, time-based, predictive, and prescriptive — and made the case that real-time data collection is what moves a plant from reactive to predictive. That means instrumenting the machine itself, not just the process: vibration, current, voltage, flow, pressure, and actuation timing trended over time to catch degradation before it becomes failure. Romano connected the dots to the broader Industry 4.0 picture — IIoT, AI and machine learning, digital twins, and the ISA-95 architecture that organizes it all — and pointed to tools on the demo floor, including Rockwell’s Emulate3D for physics-based digital twins and FactoryTalk DataMosaix for connecting and analyzing plant data. The honest throughline: the technology is finally mature, but the hard part is clean, organized, well-contextualized data.
Look for a forthcoming article on predictive and prescriptive maintenance — and the data foundation it requires.
Beyond the four sessions, the exhibit floor was where the day came alive. More than 25 automation and technology partners ran live demonstrations, and the format gave attendees something a webinar never can: the chance to see hardware run, compare options side by side, and talk through their own applications with the people who know the products best.
A first-time event lives or dies on the people who show up, and this one delivered. Thank you to the customers who spent an afternoon with us, to the more than 25 vendor partners who brought their best technology and their sharpest people, and to everyone who asked the hard questions that made the sessions worth attending.
If the showcase sparked a question about your own operation — whether a cobot fits your line, how to get useful data off your equipment, what traceability looks like for your parts, or how to move from reactive to predictive maintenance — that’s exactly the conversation our team is here for. The technology on the floor that day is technology HESCO can help you evaluate, specify, and deploy.
Want to talk through what you saw — or what you missed? Get in touch with the HESCO team and let’s work through it together. And keep an eye on the blog: deeper articles on each of the four session topics are on the way.