Walk through any manufacturing facility built in the last 50 years and you will find: control cabinets. Steel enclosures, tucked against a wall or mounted on a machine, packed with terminal strips, power supplies, contactors, drives, PLCs, and wiring for all of them. Building one of these cabinets properly takes skilled electricians, careful layout, engineering & documentation plus multiple days of labor. For many machines, 50+ hours of cabinet build time is not unusual before a single line of code has been tested.
Beckhoff Automation has been working on a different model. The MX-System entered full series production in mid-2025 and It replaces the traditional control cabinet entirely with a modular, plug and play system that mounts directly on the machine.
What the MX-System Actually Is
The MX-System is a modular backplane & module hardware suite designed for harsh industrial environments. The first part of any MX-System installation is an aluminum baseplate, available in 1-row, 2-row, and now 3-row configurations. This baseplate holds standardized mechanical and electrical connections for function modules that simply plug in and lock down with screws.
Beckhoff MX function modules cover the full range of what a traditional control cabinet contains: mains connection and power distribution, power supplies, servo drives, I/O modules, and industrial PCs. All connectors are standardized across the system, meaning every module connects the same way regardless of its function. There is no custom wiring between modules — the baseplate takes care of power distribution & EtherCAT communications internally.
The entire system carries an IP67 rating, meaning it is dust tight and protected against flooding with water. This is what allows it to be mounted directly on machines, in environments where a traditional control cabinet would need its own protective enclosure or a controlled room.
The 1-Hour Setup Claim: Is It Real?
Beckhoff claims a complete MX-System can be set up in one hour including testing. Compared to a minimum of 24 hours for an equivalent traditional control cabinet. This is frequently cited feature of the system, and it is worth understanding what that actually means.
The “one hour” figure refers to physical installation and connection of preselected modules onto a preconfigured baseplate. This assumes the engineering has been done upfront — the module selection, layout, and TwinCAT configuration completed prior to installation day. What it eliminates is the physical wiring work such as mounting DIN rail, terminating hundreds of wires, labeling conductors, and most of the QA/QC intensive cabinet builds require.
Under these constraints the 1 hour claim holds weight. The MX-System does reduce “on machine” installation time by quite a bit. Effort required to properly engineer a system does not vanish, but it moves more into the TwinCAT software environment, where programming can be templated and reused across machine variants.
Key Insight: The MX-System does not eliminate engineering hours — it front-loads them into the software environment where they can be standardized and reused. OEMs who develop module selection templates for their common machine types will see the biggest overall time savings.
Wiring Errors: Eliminated by Design
A big benefit of the MX-System is the reduced possibility of wiring errors. In conventional control system builds, wiring mistakes are a common cause of delays during commissioning. Reversed polarity on a sensor input, a miswired input, a mislabeld wire, all of these are errors that can take hours to find and minutes to fix. But they occur often even on experienced teams.
With the MX-System, there is no “point to point” wiring between modules. Physical connection is handled by a standardized interface. If the right module is installed in the right slot, it is connected properly. The prossiblity of wiring error drops significantly for field wiring because the system provides standardized, well labeled connection points instead of terminal strip arrangements, which are prone to costly mistakes.
The 3-Row Baseplate: Opening Up Larger Machines
When the MX-System first launched, there were limitations. High power applications and larger machines still required a traditional control cabinet for power distribution. The original size 1 and size 2 function modules could not handle the current levels that a piece of heavy industrial machinery needs.
In mid-2025, Beckhoff addressed this directly with the introduction of 3-row baseplates and size 3 function modules. The first size 3 modules support a 600V DC bus at 40A nominal current, a servo controller at 28A, and a power supply capable of 63A. Future size 3 modules will provide AC load switching up to 16A and feeds up to 125A.
This means the MX-System is well suited to the majority of industrial machine applications. Machines that may have had to use the MX-System in a hybrid configuration, with a partial cabinet still present for power distribution, can now be designed as fully “cabinet free” systems.
Real-World Deployments: Packaging, Robotics, and Window Manufacturing
The MX-System is really in use. Several industrial applications in current day production are using it as you read this article.
Schirmer Maschinen GmbH, a company that makes equipment for PVC window profiles, became one of the first machine builders to replace all control cabinets on a machine with the MX-System. Their 14-meter profile processing machine a multi-axis servo drive system, now runs entirely on MX system backplanes.
R.A. Jones, a Coesia Group company manufacturing vertical chub packaging machines for viscous foods like soups and minced meat, implemented the MX-System to reduce their machine footprint. In this application, the elimination of the control cabinet and associated cable runs reduced the machine’s physical footprint substantially. In food processing environments where floor space is expensive and sanitation access is important, this matters quite a bit.
RO-BER, part of the SSI Schäfer Group, debuted a fully automated order picking cell using the MX-System at LogiMAT 2025, demonstrating the MX in logistics automation and high throughput part picking environments.
TwinCAT Integration and EtherCAT Communication
The MX system communicates internally using EtherCAT, Beckhoff’s high speed industrial Ethernet protocol. This means it integrates natively and seamlessly into any TwinCAT 3 or TwinCAT PLC++ control system. From the TwinCAT engineering environment, MX system modules appear and behave exactly like EtherCAT I/O terminals. They use the same configuration tools, the same diagnostics and the same online monitoring.
Beckhoff users already comfortable with TwinCAT and EtherCAT I/O configuration will find adopting an MX does not require a steep learning curve. The hardware is different but the software workflow is familiar.
Addressing the Skilled Labour Shortage
An issue that Beckhoff brings up repeatedly when discussing the MX system is the industrial skilled labour shortage. Wiring of traditional control cabinets requires trained electricians with specific experience. In many markets including Canada and the United States this labour is increasingly difficult to find and expensive when found.
The MX-System’s “plug and play” installation model means that the physical installation of modules on a baseplate can be performed by almost anyone without specialist training. The skilled engineering work such as system design, software configuration, commissioning still falls to qualified engineers. But the physical buildout, which takes up a large portion of traditional project hours, is being shortened and requires less skill.
Is the MX-System Right for Your Application?
This system is not necesarily the right fit for every application. Very large power distribution requirements are still being dealt with as the size 3 module range expands. Applications with extreme environmental demands such as high pressure washdown, explosive atmospheres, extreme temperature ranges, all of these require additional evaluation. And any site team used to traditional cabinet work will face a learning curve and need time to adapt.
For OEMs designing new machine generations though, or for integrators looking to improve installation efficiency, the MX-System is worth looking at. The technology is proven, compatibility is growing rapidly, and Beckhoff’s commitment to the platform is clear based on the pace of new product releases.
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