Council Post: Advancing To The Future Of Industrial Automation

Although factories and processing plants around the world are progressively adopting more automation to improve production, quality and efficiency, these efforts remain largely old-school, using hard-coded automation logic that endures statically once it is commissioned. Continuous marginal improvement is possible through the efforts of hands-on operations personnel, but once a system is in production, it is often difficult to initiate major changes. But what if an automation platform could provide the intelligence and visualization needed to empower operations personnel to make certain adjustments in real time? These improvements could include minor changes, often suggested by data visualization and analytics, or significant changes driven by machine learning-enabled automated decision-making. This would allow organizations to move beyond basic automation and toward a much more advanced state of automation, keeping them competitive.