Key points
Recently, exciting new opportunities around process automation have moved to the top of the agenda for many businesses. With new artificial intelligence tools, many day-to-day business processes may be made more efficient and more accurate. What many will not always realise, though, is that manufacturing has been reaping the benefits of high speed, highly accurate automation for many years.
Indeed, almost everything anyone interacts with on a daily basis, from peanut butter to paper, was made possible by machine-driven process control. That doesn’t mean, however, that industrial process automation is a solved problem or that businesses should put their whole focus on other areas.
As the world changes, and as technologies across businesses become more advanced, there are significant opportunities to be realised – and risks to be avoided – by investing in smarter, more integrated process automation.
In light of this, what should industry be targeting as it considers the future of its process automation strategies?
Understanding the new process automation challenge
Of course, the range of machinery involved in process automation is as diverse as the range of goods that manufacturing environments produce. That means that every manufacturer’s journey will be different. However, there are still some general challenges that all such organisations are facing, and which are important to understand.
Competitive, adaptable physical infrastructure
While industrial infrastructure typically has an exceedingly long lifecycle, manufacturers today are typically facing ever shorter-term demands to adapt in terms of how they produce goods. This is partly because new technologies and approaches are becoming available more frequently, and adopting them in a timely manner is an important part of maintaining a competitive market position. At the same time, changing needs of partners, customers, and end-users are calling for a more agile manufacturing value chain.
Evolving cybersecurity methods
As the physical elements of a business’s value chain have become more connected by default, operational technology has increasingly come to be seen as a common weak point in cybersecurity strategies, and manufacturing is no exception. The threat landscape for cybersecurity evolves rapidly, so process automation needs to be able to quickly adapt its security posture in response.
Jobs and skills fit for the future
Both within manufacturing and beyond, talent acquisition in a tight labour market is a key challenge. For manufacturing management specifically, that can also mean reckoning with an ageing workforce taking long-standing skills and experience with them as they retire.
Taking a modern approach to process automation is therefore just as much about providing an engaging, attractive working environment which places less emphasis on manual roles as it is about more direct efficiency and productivity gains.
Observable, usable data outputs
As enterprises at large start to realise the potential of broad-strokes automation, real-time data on actual business performance will be in high demand as a pre-requisite for the most impactful new strategies.
Integrating manufacturing with the rest of the business on a data level will be a key task for a new generation of process engineers, making what happens on the production floor an even bigger driver of overall success.
Any successfully digitalised approach therefore needs to look outwards to other workflows even as it improves productivity internally.
The challenge with traditional process automation
While process automation has well-developed configuration tools, the technologies underlying those tools has not historically been shared and interoperable. Vendors have independently developed many diverse approaches to making tools interact.
This state of affairs may have been quite natural in a pre-digitalised age, but today it introduces significant friction to many vital aspects of what manufacturing environments need to achieve. It calls for bespoke approaches to integrating hardware from multiple vendors, which both adds to the time and costs involved and potentially opens up significant security issues.
It means that professionals must constantly re-engineer configurations, taking resources away from the valuable work of introducing best practices to new environments. And it means that it is more difficult for information systems in the wider business to access, understand, and act on what is happening in manufacturing processes.
Moving forward with an open-centric solution
For true interoperability and openness in process automation to be effective, resilient, and long-lasting, it first needs to address the underlying technologies and assumptions which link processes together. With an open, standards-based architecture, both suppliers and end users can innovate more easily and profitably, while maintaining modern security and creating new, valuable roles in the workforce.
Establishing that architecture is the work of The Open Group Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF). As a vendor-neutral, consensus-based working group, OPAF is creating an inclusive framework which aims to address both the technical and the business requirements of an open and interoperable architecture for process automation, ultimately serving to benefit all stakeholders.
