Editor’s choice
How industrial Hyperautomation could transcend buzzword status
WHAt tHrEAt dOEs tHE skills gAp HAvE ON tHE MANUfActUriNg iNdUstry? If the skills shortage continues, there may be severe consequences for manufacturers. With increased operational costs and reduced productivity, manufacturers unable to increase production levels and satisfy growing demands will struggle to compete, grow, and perhaps even survive. With a shortage of workers, quality control and
standards can easily slip and over time cause unhappy customers that may consider alternative suppliers.
BridgiNg tHE skills gAp Fixing the skills gap will require collaborative action across government, education, and business to create a long-term solution and talent pipeline. One thing is for sure, the manufacturing skills gap requires urgent attention. So, what can businesses do to bridge the skills gap in their business?
trAiNiNg Upskilling current workers and inspiring the next generation should be a key focus. Inviting young people to discover the wide range of jobs available and enticing them into learning STEM skills will be a key part of creating a workforce fit for the future and narrowing the skills gap. Businesses need to ensure experienced workers
are passing on their knowledge to the next generation before retiring. Businesses could consider setting up incentivised mentorship programmes and training to make sure these expert skills are not lost forever.
BEst prActicE Upskilling employees and ensuring training is up to date with best practices is essential. The skills gap creates an opportunity for your business to look at more efficient ways of working and continually drive improvement. ISO 9001 is the world’s most recognised quality
management system Standard. It is designed to help businesses of any size ensure they meet the needs of customers and other stakeholders, by having a framework in place that helps ensure consistent quality in the provision of goods and services. ISO 9001 can be a powerful improvement tool to
help businesses streamline and improve the efficiency of processes leading to cost savings and increases in profit. Having a quality management system in place can increase productivity and help employees in their day-to-day roles with limited disruption. Implementing the Standard can also increase customer satisfaction by reducing errors and boosting customer confidence in your ability to deliver. Closing the skills gap will be vital for the
manufacturing industry and the UK economy. And manufacturers that do mind the gap will build resilience for the future and have a competitive advantage.
QMS International
www.qmsuk.com Instrumentation Monthly August 2022
On the face of it, it is difficult to see why the idea of hyperautomation is especially relevant to industrial automation as it exists in the real world. But Neil Ballinger, general manager EMEA of EU Automation, believes there is an opportunity for early adopter businesses to outpace the rest.
and-place, realm, where countless businesses still play. Here, the idea of automating a process with a robot or collecting some data from a machine to perform advanced analytics is still quite radical. The second is the world of the early
T
adopter, where robots make robots in a lights-out-manufacturing environment, with machines making decisions for machines and all communication done at edge level, using sophisticated AI. You will have seen this manufacturing environment regularly; Will Smith drove an Audi TT through it in I, Robot for instance. You will also have come across it at Weyland-Yutani, Cyberdene Systems and Wayne Enterprises. Most of us live in a space between these
two worlds, where small automation is commonplace and big automation is a constant background hum, something we use, sometimes every day in the case of an ERP system for example, but that we rarely design or implement. The idea of small automation was first
outlined in strategy+business magazine in 2019, where three PwC strategists, Dan Priest, Kumar Krishnamurthy and Alex Blanter, argued that “small automation is the fast implementation of flexible and adaptable technologies that fill the gaps left by your current enterprise systems - enabling new levels of productivity.” It is easy to see that, while Priest,
Krishnamurthy and Blanter were thinking software, such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation), natural language processing and machine learning, the idea is equally applicable to operational technology. Small automation in OT might be about a single industrial robot installation, inverter-controlled motors giving precise feedback, or HMIs and PLCs monitoring and running processes on a small scale. In this world, we have finally come to
understand that the enterprise tech stack and the industrial tech stack are inherently connected, and this realisation has driven huge increases in productivity and profitability over the last decade. However, hyperautomation seems to
drive a new wedge between the worlds of IT and OT. But it does not have to;
here are two worlds of automation. One is the conservative, day-to-day, pick-
there is no reason that Business Process Management (BPM) and RPA, for instance, must stop at the edge of the enterprise layer.
HypErAUtOMAtiON ANd sMAll AUtOMAtiON Understanding that hyperautomation and small automation are not opposites, but rather compatible ideas, is the key to benefitting from both, even if you are not quite yet in the I, Robot or Cyberdene Systems automation world. Johan Jonzon, CMO and co-founder
of Crosser, a pioneer in edge analytics and integration, says, “The goal of a hyperautomation strategy is to eliminate any unnecessary steps in the process of completing a task and automate those remaining. “This streamlines business process,
reducing the need for human intervention. Automating data workflows reduces the workload for IT teams and increases overall business efficiency. Once automated, the workflows can easily be managed in a single digital platform,” he concludes. This sounds compatible with small
automation and exactly the sort of thing I see happening more and more in the real world. For instance, most companies making anything will produce a Bill of Materials (BoM) and many will use that to generate a production order. It is a very short step from this to
being able to share that BoM with a series of automation parts suppliers, who can in turn bid to supply those parts. It could even be that a BPM or RPA software could bid for the contract to supply those parts automatically. Either way, linking hyperautomation
and small automation can make the overwhelming manageable and re-create the link between enterprise technology and operational technology.
EU Automation
www.euautomation.com/uk
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