Monthly Archives: May 2017

Forbes

Millennials And Automation: A Departmental Examination Forbes Automation is the way of the future; not just in the American workplace, but globally. Currently, about 60 percent of businesses could have one-third or more of their business processes fully automated by modern technologies. As those technologies ...

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Millennials And Automation: A Departmental Examination - Forbes

NEW YORK Retailers are no strangers to embracing technology; however, a new report estimates that between 6 and 7.5 million retail jobs risk being eliminated because of automation in the industry.

Retail cashiers are at highest risk for automation technologies, and women hold 73 percent of these positions.

That's according to a new study, Retail Automation: Stranded Workers? Opportunities and Risks for Labor and Automation, conducted by Cornerstone Capital Group and commissioned by the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute (IRRCi).

The report identifies the structural factors catalyzing change in the retail industry which employs roughly 16 million U.S. workers and is authored by Sebastian Vanderzeil and Michael Shavel of Cornerstone.

The retail industry represents 10 percent of the nation's working population and generates 6 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). A lack of disclosure on key labor metrics by retailers puts investors in the dark on how these companies are responding and what the fate of their workers could be, according to Cornerstone.

"This in-depth examination of retail automation gives investors insights as they consider investment risks and opportunities," said Jon Lukomnik, IRRCi executive director. "While the findings are important to investors, they should sound the alarm for economists and political leaders.

"The shrinking of retail jobs in many ways threatens to mirror the decline in manufacturing in the U.S. Moreover, in this case, workers at risk are already disproportionately working poor, so any disruption may cause strains in the social safety net and stresses on local tax revenues," Lukomnik added.

Among the report's findings:

"The retail landscape is changing rapidly and investors need to understand the social and governance issues impacting valuations for public companies in this sector," said Erika Karp, Cornerstone founder and CEO. "Retailers are facing a perfect storm: they need to balance demand for wage increases with the negative optics of future job losses.

"The winners in retail will be companies that provide recruitment, retention and training for workers and innovate with forward-thinking future store strategies," Karp said.

The report details the technologies retailers are deploying, looks at the drivers of automation, and provides a framework to analyze the automation strategies of 30 large retail companies.

In some cases, technology is complementing labor by freeing workers from mundane tasks and facilitating a more personalized customer experience. In others, technology has the potential to automate a significant part of the sales process and render a range of jobs redundant, according to Cornerstone.

Taken together, store closures and technology have the potential to dramatically alter the employment landscape in America.

To access the report, click here.

Based in New York, IRRCi is a nonprofit research organization that funds academic and practitioner research enabling investors, policymakers, and other stakeholders to make data-driven decisions

New York-based Cornerstone is an SEC-registered Investment advisor focused on helping its client base of individuals, family offices, foundations and endowments to align their investments with their mission, values or interests while seeking to achieve competitive investment returns. Cornerstone works with asset owners, corporations and financial institutions to promote new research in the field of environmental, social and governance analysis.

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Retail Automation Threatens 6M-Plus Jobs - CSNews Online

The low price of crude may have slowed the advance of drilling automation technology, but it clearly has not stopped it. Uptake is rising, chiefly in the US onshore market, where contractors including Nabors and Precision Drilling have recently rolled out their first batch of closed-loop automated rigs that take key pieces of the well construction process out of human hands.

Service giant Schlumberger is doing the same after it acquired a number of drilling technology firms in recent years, including one that developed rig control systems for the competitiona factor that has been seen as incentivizing other drilling contractors to accelerate their automated ambitions.

The introduction of these new rig systems comes at an opportune time for contractors because US demand for high-performance rigs is rising at its fastest clip since the downturn began. The swelling rig count is being met with a shortage of qualified hands, another factor adding momentum to the adoption of rig automation.

I do not think that the traditional means of training lots and lots of people will fly anymore because you get a variable output, and it costs a lot of money, said John de Wardt of the current drilling environment. If you can buy an automated drilling system, then you save a lot of money on people and trainingand you know it will do what you want to do.

De Wardt, a Colorado-based oil and gas consultant, is the program manager for the Drilling Systems Automation (DSA) roadmap initiative that was created to guide the industrys technology development strategy through 2025. Launched in 2013 as an all-volunteer initiative, the DSA has since become a 10-member joint industry project formed by a different group of companies than those mentioned above, including Shell, Saudi Aramco, National Oilwell Varco (NOV), and Halliburton.

As the various players in the automation arena ramp up their development work and early-commercialization efforts, the DSA roadmap shows that the industry is still a ways off from the final destination of fully autonomous rigsthe nuanced view would describe todays newest advanced drilling assets as semi-autonomous.

To get to greater autonomy, the industry must decide which way to go on what de Wardt refers to as the forks in the road. These are the key technological decisions that he said will determine what form drilling automation takes going forward.

A few of the most important include whether companies should invest in interoperable systems or proprietary ones; open software or black-box programing; low-rate mud-pulse data communications or high-speed hardwired pipe; keep retrofitting or begin designing purpose-built automated rigs.

From the view of the roadmap, one of the shortest routes to full-automation can be taken if equipment manufacturers embrace interoperability so their various hardware and software products can work and communicate together. This would encourage uptake by giving end-users more flexibility in the integration of an automated solution.

This is also easier said than done because, Our industry has fostered 100% competitiveness, de Wardt said in explaining that the challenge of implementing interoperability is not technical, it is managerial.

Drawing on the experience of the industrial automation sector, he told how a similar tug-of-war played out between companies who sought to secure market share with proprietary systems and those that assumed an agnostic approach to data communication.

In the end, the open system people won, de Wardt said. Companies that placed the right bet, such as Fortune 500-listed Emerson Electric, became leaders in the sector while proprietary-system makers faded out of the picture. This question over interoperability also reshaped the auto-industry whose biggest firms decided to agree on key standards and compete on their ability to innovate.

As an industry, were still trying to get our heads around what is the collaboration piece, and what is the competition piece, said de Wardt. If we get that right, then we will progress far faster than we are today.

In a similar vein, automation developers must decide if their software will be open for customers to validate and integrate with add-on programing. The alternative is black box software that does not show its math. To create some middle ground on this issue, the DSA roadmaps recommendation is to create a non-competing certification body that can sign off on such software products.

What we are saying is that if people have black boxes that give outputs that can improve the performance of the human on the rig or goes into the rigs control system, a validation methodology would allow them to tell customers that an authority has confirmed its reliability, said de Wardt. It will need some description around what its limitations are, and overviews of how it does it, without giving away proprietary information, and today, that is not done.

Another bellwether to watch in the automation race is what telemetry and data communication systems will win out. In terms of data rates, nothing compares to the 50,000 bps speed of NOVs wired drillpipe. The downside of the technology is that it has been cost prohibitive for many. The company is working to bring the price down by stepping up its manufacturing, while others are trying to push the limits of low-bandwidth mud-pulse, electro-magnetic and acoustic telemetry systems that transmit data at 40-80 bps.

De Wardt said developers are quietly working on clever ways to improve mud-pulse telemetry systems to a point where they can be used to expand downhole automation capabilities, as opposed to surface-controlled automation via wired pipe.

The question is, which of these systems will predominate and what is their price point. That will determine how the automation map looks, in the years to come, said de Wardt.

As the timeline expands further out, the drilling sector will be contemplating whether to redesign the drilling rig from the bottom up as a natively automated systemeffectively, to make it a drilling robot.

While the DSA does not see retrofitting existing rigs as the most valuable option, it is the most attractive for now. Rig demand in the US is far from recovering to 2014 levels, and may never do so, but de Wardt reminded that the industry has a long tradition of avoiding the obsoleting of such capital intensive assets.

What these companies and their customers are weighing is the known value of the current top-tier rig inventory against the potential value of a purpose-built automated fleet.

In the US drilling market, with its very high performance, that gap is small, de Wardt said, highlighting the point that in recent years human drillers have realized major gains in efficiencies, significantly raising the bar on what the next level of automated rigs must offer to justify investment.

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These Are the Forks in the Road to Drilling Automation - Journal of Petroleum Technology

Google is putting out a new free marketing tool to help businesses and marketers process more data more easily, with the help of automation.

Called Google Attribution, the tool can help companies better target groups of consumers with content that appeals to them.

Instead of a marketer having to look separately at data from Google Analytics and advertising tools AdWords and DoubleClick, they can use Google Attribution to look at data from those tools together.

Analysis of that data is also automated, the goal being to show users more useful insights into why ads and marketing efforts are effective or not.

Currently in a testing phase, the tool is starting to be rolled out as part of the annual Google Marketing Next conference in San Francisco, where Google announces new products and improvements for advertisers and marketers. Googles revenue comes overwhelmingly from advertising.

A major theme at the conference will be machine learning, so expect to hear more out of the conference about Googles plans to continue automating advertising and marketing tools.

Google has also announced that it is adding new local ads options to YouTube. Now when users of the video platform search topics related to items that may be sold locally, ads with information about a local seller such as address, distance from the user and phone number may pop up. These ads are already in Google Search.

The addition is notable because YouTube is a fast-growing source of ads revenue for Google, and local ads are valuable to Googles most prevalent category of advertisers.

Digital advertising platforms like Google rely more on small businesses than big brands for revenue. Small- to mid-size companies a category of advertiser that especially benefits from local search ads are responsible for 70 percent of digital ad spending, according to GroupM data cited by MoffettNathanson Research.

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Google is adding more automation to its tools for marketers - Recode

Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research, and provides a mix of tactical advice to help his clients in the current business climate.

A couple of weeks ago someone asked me to define the term digital transformation. I didnt want to give a long technical answer, so instead I gave the one word answer of speed.In the digital era, market leaders will be defined by which organization can adapt to market trends the fastest. This means the whole company must move with speedbusiness leaders need to make decisions fast, employees need to adapt to new processes quickly, and the IT department must make changes to the infrastructure with speed.

However, IT moving faster does not mean trying to execute the same manual processes 10 percent faster, as that would just lead to more errors. Nor does it mean throwing more people at the problem by adding to the IT staff. IT in the digital era means a complete re-think of operations with automation at the heart of the strategy.

To better understand why this is needed and possible to do today, I interviewed Pablo Stern, general manager and vice president of ITOM for ServiceNow, at the companys recent Knowledge17 event in Orlando last week.

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Why is it time for businesses to take a serious look at their IT operations?

Pablo Stern, GM and VPof ITOM, ServiceNow

We are at an IT inflection point, so there is some urgency for businesses to look at their IT operations. Software is powering our world. Businesses need to realize that software and IT can be used to competitive differentiation. Against this backdrop, we have a number of IT challenges, such as the growth of the hybrid cloud, bimodal IT, device proliferation, data explosion and security threats, making it harder than ever for organizations to control their IT operations. It's either focus and change or go extinct.

With more organizations having mission-critical services, it makes sense for ITorganizations to be proactive versus reactive when it comes to eliminating/preventing service outages. So, what is holding IT organizations back?

The problem isn't lack of desire. The biggest issue is that IT organizations and budgets haven't grown at the pace of the technology they are servicing. The situation with IT isnt pretty right nowmore critical business services, more infrastructure, more silos and increased complexity with less visibility. All this translates to more and bigger service outages that are harmful to the business. The tools of yesterday require so much handholding and manual effort that IT is stuck being tactical. They want to be a strategic partner but are ill-equipped.

How is the intersection of hot technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation going to change IT operations?

Intelligent automation is the game changer for IT operations. With machine learning you can synthesize large quantities of data and quickly find insights. Predictive analytics allows you to see ahead by looking backwards. Automation allows the operator to take their hands off the wheel. When combined, IT can quickly assess the landscape, predict what will happen, and take action automatically.

For example, at ServiceNow, we've announced that we leverage anomaly detection and predictive modeling to help IT understand, predict and automate themselves out of service outages. Now, IT truly becomes the strategic partner to the business.

With more businesses investing in hybrid cloud environments, IT departments are facing new sets of challenges, such as increased overhead to deploy, manage and optimize infrastructure. How is ServiceNow going to help deal with this?

Hybrid cloud environments bring a dual challenge to business. The end userwho is trying to leverage these capabilities to get their job doneand ITwho is trying to regain control.At ServiceNow, we give the end user a self-service portal that allows them to deploy and manage their business services. In parallel, we empower IT by giving them complete visibility to their hybrid cloud environment and giving them the tools they need to reduce risk and manage cost. This puts the end user in the driver's seat and enables IT to be strategic. It's a win-win.

There is currently a tremendous amount of fear from IT about automation replacing their jobs. By moving to an automated environment, isnt IT just putting them out of work?

Absolutely not. IT should consider automation their friend. Its a tool to help them do their job better. IT departments are drowning right now in a sea of data, complexity and manual processes, and the problem is only going to get worse. Over the next five years, billions of new devices will be added to the network, all spewing out more data, which will accentuate the problem even more.

Businesses desperately need IT to build new skills, such as data science, analytics and other areas, but IT cant do it if theyre spending all their time doing tasks that could be automated. IT can shepherd in a new era of efficiency, managed by IT, and increase capacity by 10x magnitude. Automation isnt the enemy but rather the salvation for IT.

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IT departments should automate operations now - Network World

This is part of NRNs special coverage of the 2017 NRA Show, being held in Chicago, May 20-23. Visit NRN.comfor the latest coverage from the show, plus follow us on Twitterand Facebook.

Scheduling, delivery and automation were key topics at tech exhibits at the NRA Show, particularly for operators looking to trim labor costs and improve efficiency.

Heres a look at whats new in tech from the show floor:

A new self-service kiosk from BrightSign and Felbro Displays

Delivery and takeout marketplace Grubhub announced an integration with point-of-sale provider Oracle Hospitality that allows restaurants to manage in-house, delivery and takeout orders from one device.

The integration removes a common pain point. Previously, staffers manually put Grubhub orders into the POS system, which took time and left room for error. With the integration, Grubhubs website and apps will also have automatic access to menu updates and pricing changes, and financial information will be consolidated, eliminating the need for staff to juggle information from multiple devices.

The integration includes users of the Breadcrumb POS by Upserve and Toast.

As a result, Toast introduced new takeout and delivery features, as well as a free food-cost calculator that can help operators know what to put on their menu with data from other restaurants in the area and pricing.

OpenSimSim unveiled a free, cloud-based scheduling tool that allows real-time notifications to workers mobile devices, a template for easy schedule creation, and message board and chat capabilities.

Workers can update availability, ask for time off, swap shifts or apply for extra hours. The scheduler has been beta tested in the San Diego restaurants Urge American Gastropub and Pardon My French Bar & Kitchen.

Noodoe showed off its tableside service block, with five customizable calls to action.

Autec's sushi robot

Guests can flip the block to the icon facing up to, say, call their server, or ask for water or the check. The block sends a wireless signal to a digital wristband worn by the server. The wristband vibrates and lets the server know what the guests need and at which table.

The Noodoe block can also be used in the kitchen to allow line cooks to call food runners when a plate is ready. Its also good for private dining or out-of-the-way tables, said Steve Kuo, Noodoes founder. The service block is in use at the California restaurants Cicciottis and Bubs At The Ballpark.

OpenTable has joined forces with QSR Automations DineTime to allow guests to book reservations or get on the waiting list for casual-dining restaurants.

OpenTable offers reservations for more than 42,000 restaurants around the world, including many high-end concepts, while QSR Automations is a kitchen and restaurant management platform for about 80 percent of the largest casual-dining chains. With the partnership, guests can use OpenTable to estimate wait times and add their names to waitlists.

Startup Alley has more interactive exhibits with video games, ping pong and beer pong.

Digital signage specialist BrightSigndebuted a new self-service kiosk, developed in partnership with Felbro Displays.

Self-serve ordering at kiosks has the potential to be the next big thing in restaurant-based digital signage, said Jeff Hasting, BrightSigns CEO, in a statement. Similar to how digital menu boards reinvented the restaurant experience over the past decade, kiosks will be central to restaurant design in the years ahead as proprietors further explore the use of technology to enrich the customer experience.

Autec displayed several models of its sushi robot, a machine of sorts that can make 400 sushi rolls in an hour. Humans must insert the seaweed and the machine rolls out a perfect layer of rice. The human adds the filling fish and wasabi and the robot rolls it into a perfect sushi roll. Another machine cuts the roll into bite-sized pieces.

Zuushas been known for automated scheduling in the quick-service segment, but this year theyre moving into full-service restaurants, offering a labor management program that shows labor and corresponding sales hour by hour throughout a shift, or even down to 15-minute increments. The platform is compatible with NCR, Toast, Micros and Revel systems.

Correction: May 22, 2017 An earlier version of this story misspelled Zuus. It has been updated.

Contact Lisa Jennings at[emailprotected]

Follow her on Twitter:@livetodineout

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The latest in tech: Scheduling, delivery and automation - Nation's Restaurant News