On September 22, 2021, Rockwell Automation’s own lead-time bulletin listed a ControlLogix 5580 controller at 35 calendar days against a standard lead time of “Stock”. On October 26, 2022, the same bulletin listed the same controller at 208 days, just under 30 weeks, and a 1756 analog input card at 233 days. The Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor has every edition of that bulletin we could recover, eleven of them between July 2021 and March 2023, and the PLC line in the Monitor today reads what Rockwell’s standard column read before the shortage: stock.
Source: Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor (compiled from Rockwell Automation Manufacturing Lead Times bulletins via Wayback Machine, pdf4pro and Scribd mirrors; as of March 2023)
The chart reads 5 weeks for the ControlLogix 5580 CPU in September 2021, 6 in December, 8 in February 2022, 29 in July, 30 in October and January 2023, and 23 by March 29, 2023; the 1756 analog I/O line runs 6, 6, 15, 32, 33, 37, 37 over the same dates, and the CompactLogix 5380 CPU peaked at 31 weeks in January 2023 before falling to 17 by the end of March. Every row is in plc-lead-times.csv with the archive URL it came from. This piece covers where those bulletins came from and what they said, the backlog that went from $1.6 billion to $5.6 billion, the chip supply that caused it, what a surplus controller cost when you could not get one, the destocking that followed at Siemens, Rockwell and Schneider, the price that never came back down, the component indices that are turning again in 2026, and, behind the wall, the second-sourcing playbook: which functions can leave the Rockwell rack without a rewrite, how to hold spares, and the frame-agreement clauses that guarantee allocation the next time.
What Rockwell Published Every Two Weeks
Rockwell does not publish product-level lead times today. Its supply-chain page says some product lines have returned to pre-pandemic lead times, others remain constrained, and sends the reader to a distributor. That page has read the same way since at least June 2023, and the number a buyer actually gets is the distributor’s, which is what the Quote Check tool reads against the Monitor. But between August 2021 and March 2023 the same URL carried a PDF titled “Rockwell Automation Manufacturing Lead Times,” refreshed every two weeks, listing every constrained product family, its standard lead time, its current average lead time in calendar days, and an arrow for the change. The August 2021 version of the page promised exactly that: we will monitor and adjust our finished good lead times every two weeks (up and down). The Wayback Machine kept nine editions of the PDF; a distributor’s mirror on pdf4pro kept the January 12, 2022 edition; two Scribd uploads kept February 23, 2022 and March 29, 2023.
The July 28, 2021 edition did not list the ControlLogix 5580 at all, because it was still shipping at standard; it listed CompactLogix L1 and L3 controllers at 45 days and Kinetix 5700 servo drives at 38. By November 17, 2021 the 5580 was on the list at 41 days, PowerFlex 525 drives at 76, CompactLogix 5380 at 54. The January 12, 2022 edition had the 5580 at 42 days and the 1769 L2 CompactLogix at 123; six weeks later, on February 23, 2022, the 5580 was 57, the 5069 CompactLogix 132, Kinetix 5700 143, and the Micro800 line 136. Then the step: on July 20, 2022 the 5580 read 200 days, 5069 CompactLogix 197, 1756 analog I/O 222, Kinetix 5700 225.
The high-water marks by family, from the same bulletins: ControlLogix 5580 controllers 208 days (October 26, 2022); CompactLogix 5380 controllers 214 days and 1756 analog I/O 259 days and Kinetix 5700 264 days (January 18, 2023); 1732ES ArmorBlock Guard I/O 292 days and PanelView Plus 7 Standard 15-inch 256 days (March 29, 2023). Thirty-seven weeks for an analog card, forty-two for a safety I/O block. The “20 to 36 weeks on processors, 16 to 26 on I/O” that integrators reported in the field is consistent with Rockwell’s own numbers, with the integrators’ figures sitting slightly under the bulletin on CPUs and well under it on I/O. The distributor bulletins were downstream of this PDF: Electrical Supply & Equipment’s Rockwell delivery-date page still describes dates forecast and updated biweekly for ControlLogix controllers, I/O, CompactLogix, Kinetix and PowerFlex 755, the same list of families.
Note the one thing the bulletins never changed: the “standard lead time” column read “Stock” for every controller, I/O card, drive and HMI on the list. Rockwell’s definition of normal is a distributor shelf. That is the baseline the Lead-Time Monitor uses for the PLC class, and it is why the PLC line is the only row in the Monitor whose recovered state is a word rather than a number of weeks. The OEM Disclosure Scorecard credits Rockwell for having published this table at all for twenty months; no other automation OEM did. It also records that the table stopped in 2023 and has not returned.
The Backlog Went From $1.6 Billion to $5.6 Billion
Rockwell’s 10-K puts the order backlog at $1,557.1 million on September 30, 2020 and $2,910.5 million a year later. The FY2022 10-K reports $5,197.0 million at September 30, 2022: Intelligent Devices $2,086.1 million, Software & Control $1,456.8 million, Lifecycle Services $1,654.1 million. The peak came two quarters later. Manufacturing Dive, reporting the April 27, 2023 call, wrote that the backlog sat at $5.6 billion at the end of Q2, up from $5.2 billion at the beginning of the year, with CEO Blake Moret guiding it to $5 billion by year-end. It fell faster than that: over $4.1 billion at September 30, 2023, then $3,090.6 million in 2024 and $2,878 million in 2025.
Source: Open Factory Book-to-Bill Table (compiled from Rockwell Automation 10-K FY2021 to FY2025, prepared remarks, Manufacturing Dive; as of November 2025)
The bars read $1.6 billion, over $2 billion, $2.9 billion, over $5 billion, $5.2 billion, $5.6 billion, $4.1 billion, $3.1 billion and $2.9 billion; the two product segments went from $549 million combined in 2020 to $3,543 million in 2022 and back to $1,358 million in 2025, while Lifecycle Services stayed between $1.0 billion and $1.75 billion the whole way. Rockwell told investors in November 2022 that pre-pandemic it held about one month of the following year’s product revenue in backlog, and that the backlog then represented over 50% of the FY2023 sales guide for both product segments, in its own words: this unprecedented backlog coverage adds to our confidence in our revenue outlook. Six months of product backlog against one month normal is the same ratio as 208 days against stock.
The backlog was not demand in the ordinary sense. It was customers ordering forward because the lead time told them to. Rockwell said so at every step. In May 2022: at some point we expect orders to moderate, as lead-times for our products return to more normal levels. In August 2023: with improving lead times, machine builders do not need as many months of products on order and are no longer placing unusually large advance orders. In November 2023: orders decreased quicker than we expected as machine builders and distributors continued to work through inventory in response to our rapidly improving lead times. The Book-to-Bill League Table tracks the same pattern across the electrical OEMs; Rockwell was simply two years ahead of the transformer makers on the way up and on the way down.
Chips, Not Demand
Rockwell’s 10-Q for the quarter ending June 30, 2022 said the results by region, segment and industry were primarily driven by component availability rather than the underlying demand. The May 2022 prepared remarks named the fix list: incremental capacity, improved allocation percentages, opportunistic broker buys, plus qualifying new semiconductor vendors for redundant sources with the benefit expected in fiscal Q4. By June 2023 the supply-chain page said Rockwell had added a secondary source on over 1,000 components and duplicated core product lines. A PLC vendor spent eighteen months doing what its customers were told to do to it: second-sourcing.
The macro series says the same thing with a lag. The ISM Manufacturing Supplier Deliveries index, where a reading above 50 means slower deliveries, peaked at 78.8 in May 2021, its highest since 1974, and was back under 50 by November 2022. Rockwell’s ControlLogix lead time peaked seventeen months after the ISM index did, in October 2022, and did not fall below 25 weeks until March 2023, four months after ISM’s index said deliveries were speeding up. A PLC is at the end of a long chain: wafer, microcontroller, board, module, distributor shelf. The 171-day capex lead time that ISM’s own table reported at its 2022 peak (186 days in June 2022) is the average across all capital goods; a controller ran at 200 to 208 days for nine months.
Source: Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor (compiled from ISM Manufacturing Report On Business and Rockwell Automation lead-time bulletins; as of April 2026)
Left panel: 57.5 in January 2019, 47.2 in May 2020, 78.8 in May 2021, 45.1 in December 2022, 43.5 in May 2023, and 60.6 in April 2026. Right panel: 5 weeks in September 2021, 29 in July 2022, 30 in October 2022 and January 2023, 23 in March 2023. The full monthly series is in ism-supplier-deliveries.csv, and the Lead-Time Monitor launch note explains how we snapshot ISM’s report each month.
ISM’s commodities list is the better leading indicator for automation specifically. “Electronic Components” entered the list of commodities in short supply in December 2020 and stayed for 38 consecutive months through January 2024. Semiconductors were listed for 34 straight months to September 2023. When the electronic-components streak ended in early 2024, Rockwell’s 10-Q for the quarter ending March 31, 2024 said the supply chain had largely recovered to pre-pandemic lead times and service levels. The two dates line up within a quarter.
Source: ISM Manufacturing Report On Business via Open Factory Lead-Time Monitor
The line climbs from 2 months in January 2021 to 38 in January 2024, resets to 3 in June 2024, reaches 10 in January 2025, resets again to 4 in June 2025, and has climbed every month since to 14 in April 2026; semiconductors, which had made single-month appearances in January and September 2025, were listed in March 2026 and again in April. Read that with the Rockwell data: the last time the streak passed 14 months was February 2022, when the ControlLogix bulletin read 57 days and was about to read 200.
What a Controller Cost When You Could Not Get One
Rockwell does not publish list prices, and its distributors quote under agreements, so the only public price for a ControlLogix processor is the secondary market. We pulled archived pages for one part, the 1756-L83E, a 10 MB ControlLogix 5580 CPU that sits in the middle of the range. In February 2018 Radwell, a surplus dealer that states on every Rockwell page that it is not an authorized distributor, asked $12,500 for a new unit through its independent supply chain, $9,375 for new surplus, $7,812.50 for used surplus, and $5,625 for a repair of yours. The same page, with a stated value date of May 20, 2022 and captured in March 2023, asked $25,920 for a unit in original packaging, $23,040 in Radwell packaging, $18,720 for a Radwell-certified unit, and $5,600 for a repair, with five, one and six units in US stock respectively.
Source: Open Factory Equipment Price Benchmark (compiled from Radwell and eBay product pages via Wayback Machine; as of March 2026)
The bars read $12,500 and $9,375 in 2018, $25,920 and $18,720 in May 2022, and $3,749.88 in March 2026, which is the median asking price across 54 new or sealed listings on eBay’s product page for the part (range $2,600 to $4,398, two pre-owned listings at $3,385 and $3,499). A sealed surplus 1756-L83E asked 2.1 times its 2018 price at the top of the shortage and asks 0.3 times that price now. These are asking prices from single sellers and one marketplace snapshot, not transactions, and Rockwell’s contract price to a distributor is not in any of them; the Equipment Price Benchmark records them as quotes with n and date, per its rules, and nothing more. The direction is not in doubt. When the lead time is stock, a surplus dealer is competing with a shelf; when the lead time is 208 days, a surplus dealer is competing with a shutdown.
The repair line is the one to remember. Radwell’s repair price for the same CPU was $5,625 in 2018 and $5,600 in 2022; it did not move, because the constraint was new silicon, not labor. In 2022 a plant with a failed 1756-L83E and no spare had three choices: wait 30 weeks at the distributor, pay $25,920 for a sealed surplus unit with no Rockwell warranty and no guarantee of firmware revision, or pay $5,600 and wait 5 to 20 days for a repair. The recommended spares list that every integrator attaches to a panel quote is priced for the first world, not the second.
The Bullwhip: Destocking at Siemens, Rockwell and Schneider
Siemens Digital Industries is the cleanest public record of what happened on the way down, because Siemens describes its automation orders in plain language every quarter. Q1 FY2023 (quarter to December 2022): orders EUR 6,320 million, book-to-bill ratio was at 1.24. Q3 FY2023: orders EUR 4,103 million, down 35% year on year, with an accelerated order decline in the automation businesses, most particularly in the short-cycle factory automation business; orders in prior periods were elevated by proactive customer purchasing. Q4 FY2023: customers continued destocking following former proactive purchasing. Q4 FY2024: customers were still reducing elevated stock levels due to weak global demand for manufactured goods. Q2 FY2025 (quarter to March 2025): destocking of elevated stock levels at customers approached completion toward the end of Q2 FY 2025, in China. Q3 FY2025: revenue in the automation business increased year-over-year for the first time since Q4 FY 2023.
Source: Siemens AG, Earnings Releases Q1 FY2023 to Q2 FY2026, redrawn
The bars read EUR 6.3 billion, 5.3, 4.1, 4.9, 4.0, 4.3, 4.5, 4.3, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 5.5, 4.8 and 4.8 billion from Q1 FY2023 to Q2 FY2026, and the Digital Industries profit margin went from 23.5% in Q2 FY2023 to 14.5% in Q1 FY2025 and back to 18.5% in Q2 FY2026, when Siemens raised its FY2026 Digital Industries guide to 7 to 10% revenue growth and a 17 to 19% margin. The quotes are in siemens-di-automation.csv. Two full years of destocking, Q3 FY2023 to Q2 FY2025, against roughly fifteen months of stocking up.
Rockwell’s version ran on the same calendar with a US accent. In January 2024: high levels of channel inventory and some lingering supply chain constraints continue to impact the timing of product shipments. In May 2024: the impact of high inventory levels at machine builders is larger than we expected. In February 2025: new demand placed on our distributors is flowing through at close to 100% in terms of new orders on Rockwell, matching historical levels, giving further evidence that the destocking cycle is mostly behind us. Schneider Electric’s Industrial Automation, the third of the big three in US panels, grew 3% organic for full-year 2025 and 8% in Q4 2025 “with continued recovery in Discrete automation”, with strong growth in PLC and motion for packaging OEMs and an Industrial Automation backlog of EUR 4,022 million, up 8%; Q1 2026 Industrial Automation was up 4.4% as reported by finanzwire from the April release. Rockwell’s product backlog at September 2025 ($1,358 million across the two product segments) is 2.5 times its September 2020 level on sales about 30% higher ($8,342 million in FY2025 against $6,330 million in FY2020), so the channel is still carrying more than it did in 2019, and less than half of what it carried at the peak. The Automation Roadmap carries the quarter-by-quarter reading for all three OEMs.
The buyer’s lesson from the bullwhip is not that the OEMs behaved badly. It is that the order book lied in both directions. In 2022 the backlog overstated demand because every machine builder ordered twelve months of controllers to be sure of six; in 2024 the order intake understated demand because they were consuming those controllers off their own shelves. Anyone reading the Book-to-Bill Table for a PLC vendor should discount both tails; the useful signal is the lead time itself, and that is what the Monitor tracks.
Price Never Came Back Down
Lead time round-tripped. Price did not. Rockwell announced several price increases totaling 17% between mid-2021 and May 2022, and told investors the realization would lag because “much of our pricing is set by pricing agreements we have with our customers” that renew annually. The realization then showed up in the growth bridge: about 7 points of organic growth from price in Q1 FY2023, 6 in Q2, 3 in Q3, 6 in Q4; then 3, 1.5, 3.5 and 2 points through FY2024; 1, 3, 3 and 4 through FY2025; and 3 points in each of the first two quarters of FY2026, of which about half came from underlying price realization and half from tariff-based pricing.
Source: Open Factory Equipment Price Benchmark (compiled from Rockwell Automation prepared remarks Q1 FY2023 to Q2 FY2026; as of May 2026)
The bars sum to about 46 points of price across fourteen quarters, and there is no negative bar: in no quarter since the shortage has Rockwell reported price as a drag. On May 5, 2026 the company raised its full-year price outlook to 250 basis points of total price for fiscal 2026, with 150 basis points coming from underlying price and 100 basis points from tariff-based price, up 50 basis points from the prior outlook, “all from underlying price,” citing cost increases in areas affected by tariffs, demand for memory, and fuel. Rockwell’s 250 Basis Points takes that number apart line by line and Quote Check applies it to a distributor quote; this piece only needs the shape: a shortage that let the vendor take 17% in a year and hold it, followed by a normal that adds 2 to 4 points a year on top.
The tariff half has a procurement twist. Rockwell said in February 2025 it would reprice our backlog to reflect our new price lists when Canada and Mexico tariffs took effect, and its 10-Q for the quarter to March 31, 2026 says that after the Supreme Court’s February 2026 IEEPA ruling the company may be entitled to a refund of tariffs previously paid, and if tariff amounts are ultimately refunded, the Company expects to implement a refund process for qualified customers. That sentence is the whole argument of Who Gets the IEEPA Refund applied to a PLC purchase order: the tariff surcharge you paid in 2025 is recoverable only if your PO documents it as a surcharge and your frame agreement says it flows back. The Tariff Exposure Calculator prices the surcharge by HTS code; the September 2026 tariff schedule tracks which instruments still apply.
The Semiconductor Side Is Tightening Again
The component indices that led the 2021 to 2023 cycle by a year are moving again, and in the same direction. ECIA’s Industry Pulse survey of component manufacturers, distributors and reps reported the share of participants seeing increasing lead times at 20% in August 2025, 21% in November, 33% in December, nearly 40% in January 2026, 34% in February, 61% in March and 69% in April, with 92% for semiconductors and “reports of declining lead time pressure essentially nonexistent”. The pressure started in DRAM and NAND (80% reporting increases in December) and spread: 44 to 58% in other semiconductor categories in December, 78% in March.
Source: ECIA, Industry Pulse outlook articles, July 2025 to April 2026, redrawn
The bars read 23, 20, 21, 33, 40, 34, 61 and 69 percent from July 2025 to April 2026. ISM’s Supplier Deliveries index printed 60.6 in April 2026, its highest since May 2022 (65.7), and its Backlog of Orders index has been above 50 since January 2026 after 38 months below it, November 2022 to December 2025. Rockwell itself named “demand for memory” as a cost driver on May 5, 2026. None of this is a PLC shortage. In the last cycle the ISM index crossed 60 in October 2020 and Rockwell’s ControlLogix bulletin did not pass 50 days until February 2022, sixteen months later, and read 200 five months after that. That gap is the buyer’s window, and it is the stress case to run in the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule now rather than then, and the Lead-Time Monitor PLC line carries a watch flag for exactly this reason: standard lead time stock, component indices rising, no OEM bulletin yet. The row as it stands reads: standard lead time Stock (Rockwell’s own column), last OEM bulletin March 29, 2023 at 162 days for the ControlLogix CPU, watch flag on since March 2026, the month ECIA’s semiconductor share reached 78% and ISM put semiconductors back on its list.
The structural difference from 2021 is that the OEMs did the second-sourcing. Rockwell’s 1,000 components with a secondary source, its duplicated core product lines and added circuit-board capacity are real, and they are why the FY2025 10-K’s backlog is $2.9 billion rather than $5 billion. The structural similarity is that a ControlLogix CPU is still built on a handful of microcontrollers and memory parts that Rockwell buys, not makes, and that every automation OEM buys from the same fabs. If memory allocation tightens the way ECIA’s members say it is tightening, the first sign will be an OEM’s standard lead time quietly changing from “Stock” to a number, and the second will be a distributor bulletin. We will print both the day we see them.
What to Do Monday
The last cycle is a dataset, and it says three things. First, the OEM bulletin was the best public signal and it lagged the component indices by twelve to sixteen months, so watch ISM’s commodities list and ECIA’s monthly share, not the distributor. Both are in the Monitor. Second, the order book was noise in both directions, so size your spares to your own failure rate and lead time, not to what the distributor says is on order for you. Third, price does not round-trip: every increase taken during a shortage stays, and the tariff surcharge on top is recoverable only if the paperwork says so.
For a plant or an OEM buying Rockwell today, the Monday list is short. Pull your installed base of controllers, safety controllers, analog I/O and servo drives by catalog number and build the D list, the single-source items that were over 26 weeks in 2022; that list is plc-lead-times.csv sorted by peak. Put the D list into the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule with the 2022 peak as the stress case and see which project dates move. Check your open POs for a tariff surcharge line and your frame agreement for a refund clause before Rockwell’s refund process opens; the 10-Q says qualified customers, and qualified is a paperwork test you can pass this week. And write the RFQ for the next panel so that the controller family is a requirement and the I/O, HMI and drive brands are not.
One more thing the record says. Rockwell’s bulletin listed the ControlLogix CPU at 41 days in November 2021, when the ISM index had already been above 60 for a year and electronic components had been in short supply for eleven months. A buyer who ordered in November 2021 got a controller in six weeks; one who waited for the bulletin to confirm the problem, in July 2022, waited twenty-nine. The bulletin is a lagging confirmation, not a warning. The warning was on ISM’s commodities list, free, on the first business day of every month, and it is there again now, fourteen months into a new streak.
Behind the paywall: the second-sourcing playbook. Which functions in a Rockwell architecture can move to Siemens, Beckhoff or a Codesys runtime without rewriting the controller program, which cannot under IEC 61508, how to hold spares when a repair costs $5,600 and a sealed surplus CPU costs $25,920, and the five frame-agreement clauses that guarantee allocation, biweekly lead-time reporting and price hold the next time the bulletin reads 200 days. The Lead-Time Monitor carries the PLC line and the watch flag for Pro subscribers.