Feature
A Robotics Revolution: What Automation Means for Facilities Managers
By Michel Spruijt, Senior Vice President International Business at Brain Corp
With a global pandemic in the rearview mirror, facilities are recovering and looking ahead to an uncertain future. New technologies have arrived to ease the transition. Chief among these has been intelligent robots, specifically those equipped with reporting and analytics capabilities.
Facilities, warehouses, and retail stores, all have seen significant and rapid changes in a relatively short amount of time. The figures are undeniable: The IFR1
reports
that there are now on average 126 robots per 10,000 employees in the manufacturing industries – nearly double the number from five years ago.
Robotics were steadily advancing into utilities before 2020, but the sudden drive for heightened cleanliness and workforce support accelerated automation adoption. A beneficial side effect of this shift has been the growth in usable data to inform improved facilities management.
With change comes adaptation, and no one has had to adapt more radically to this overhaul than managers. Facilities Managers now have more technology at their disposal than was recently the case, which means that they are now working with an unprecedented amount of data. But this shouldn’t be cause for concern; the data boom brought on by automation presents an opportunity for those who know how to harness it.
22 fmuk The Role Of Robots
Owing to endemic staff shortages, the demand for social distancing, and a heightened need for cleanliness, facilities have deployed robots at breakneck speed enabling workers to focus on higher value tasks while their robot co-workers - or co-bots - successfully take on repetitive or hazardous roles.
Human staff remain essential in effective robot deployments. Staff oversee, maintain, and direct machines, ensuring that machines are applied intelligently within the context of a given business. Modern autonomous cleaning robots, for example, need a human user to “teach” the machine its routes before it operates autonomously.
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