Kornchanok was one of more than 200 students from five Thai universities who recently took part in a training programme organised by Delta Electronics (Thailand)s Automation Academy, designed to familiarise third- and fourth-year students with the latest technology used in factories.

Besides KMUT North Bangkok, students from Chulongkorn University, Kasetsart University, KMUT Ladkrabang and KMUT Thonburi also participated in the training programme.

An increasing number of automation systems and industrial robots have been used in the automotive, electronics, food-processing and other industries in Thailand over recent years.

According to Kornchanok, automation technology will play a key role in advancing Thai factories towards the so-called Industry 4.0 era, with benefits including increased efficiency and productivity, environmental friendliness and higher national income.

Overall, this Thailand 4.0 modernisation programme is like a national development effort for all stakeholders to join forces to achieve results.

The modernisation will increase the competitiveness of Thai industries as it means we will use more advanced technology in the manufacturing sector to boost efficiency and competitiveness.

Automation and robots should be viewed positively, even though manual labour will be affected because routine and basic work in factories can be better done by robots and automation systems.

As a result, human workers need additional skills so that they can work alongside robots and supervise the machines.

In my opinion, Thailand is now quite ready to adopt more advanced technology, as evidenced by the growing partnership between the government and private sector.

For example, companies like Delta Electronics have helped Thai universities better educate students in the technology field, by providing advanced equipment and personnel to prepare students to use the new technology.

In my opinion, the Thailand 4.0 concept is an important national focus to drive the country forward. Previously, we started out from 1.0, which basically meant the development of the agricultural sector many decades ago. Then it was 2.0, or the era of light industries, and later 3.0, which meant more complicated and heavy industries.

Now, we aspire to use more advanced technology in the manufacturing and other sectors, which could be called the 4.0 era. Industry 4.0 means machines will be more autonomous and interconnected.

In fact, more intelligent machines or industrial robots are similar to humans in the sense that they have power from electricity, have sensors like our eyes, and have controller-software [which is the brain] written by humans.

If the private sector works closely with the government and educational institutes, we will be able to achieve progress in upgrading Thai industries under the Thailand 4.0 programme.

One of the highlights is the automotive industrys move into the era of electric cars, which is considered one of the new growth industries for Thailand, which already has the largest production capacity for automobiles among all Asean countries.

In agriculture, we have also seen more automation for seed planting, watering, and harvesting etc to boost efficiency while reducing manual labour and saving time.

In fact, the digital revolution makes available a huge amount of data on the Internet so we can focus on making sense out of the vast data and create new and innovative things in virtually all sectors.

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Automation 'key' to advancing Thai production - The Nation