Monthly Archives: June 2017

WWD	SoftWear Automation Infused With $4.5 Million Investment WWD WWD Atlanta-based SoftWear Automation Inc. received a $4.5 million investment from CTW Venture Partners to fund the growth of sewbots." SoftWear Automation raises $4.5 million to build robots that sew ...TechCrunch all 3 news articles »

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SoftWear Automation Infused With $4.5 Million Investment WWD - WWD

Trade and logistics is big business in Southern California and automation is playing an increasingly bigger role as the industry seeks to remain competitive.

Thats the takeaway of a new report from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. The study reveals that 598.3 million tons of freight valued at $1.7 trillion moved throughout the region in 2015. That equated to a daily average of 1.6 million tons valued at $4.7 billion.

Needless to say, all of that activity fueled lots of jobs.

The LAEDC report shows that the regions trade and logistics sector employed 580,450 direct payroll workers in 2015, a 9.7 percent increase since 2005. An additional 273,840 jobs were supported through indirect effects and another 310,490 were supported by induced effects, creating a total employment impact of nearly 1.2 million jobs.

Indirect jobs include workers who dont directly produce goods or services but make their production possible or more efficient. Induced jobs take into account employees who work at local restaurants, gas stations, supermarkets and other businesses where trade and logistics workers spend their money.

The Inland Empire supported about half of those jobs and Los Angeles County supported another 40 percent.

The pay isnt bad. The average annual wage in the trade and logistics industry in 2015 was $63,130, about 14 percent higher than the $55,310 average annual wage for all industries in Southern California.

Wages were much higher in certain segments of the industry. Those involved in support activities for water transportation earned an average of $111,120 a year, for example, and others who work in air transportation earned an average of $75,710 a year.

Trade and logistics in Southern California generates $224.6 billion in economic output annually, sustained by direct spending of $131.9 billion, which includes $43.5 billion in labor income paid to its employees, according to the report. Industry-related expenditures indirectly generate $47.2 billion in spending at supplier businesses in the region, and compensation paid to employees fueled additional spending of $45.6 billion.

But while wages are good, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are increasingly integrating automation in their operations and thats displacing workers. Trade and logistics industries are looking to become more capital-intensive versus labor-intensive through the use of new technologies.

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The Port of Los Angeles has been transforming its TraPac terminal over the last several years by outfitting it with massive robots. Some are tasked with moving shipping containers from ships and stacking them nearby, and others load the stacked containers onto trucks for the next leg of their journey.

We have eight terminals here and one is TraPac, port spokesman Phillip Sanfield said. Its the only automated terminal and it was very expensive. The Port of L.A.s investment in TraPac was more than $400 million. Well get that back and more over the course of their lease, but its very expensive to do this. And it takes years for a company to plan and get the environmental approvals to build an automated terminal.

The Port of Long Beach has also been outfitting its Middle Harbor terminal with automated equipment, which is expected to be operative by 2020.

Self-driving trucks are also being used in warehouses in the form of autonomous forklifts. More recently, the truck transportation and drayage (short-haul) industries are looking at self-driving trucks as ways to reduce costs and boost their profit margins. But thats not going to happen right away.

Regulations have to catch up with the technology, said Shannon Sedgwick, the LAEDC economist who authored the report. That kind of technology wont be widespread until that issue is resolved.

The federal government has yet to establish laws that deal specifically with autonomous vehicles. But several states have opted to enact their own statewide laws. Another major hurdle to widespread adoption is the publics innate fear of seeing self-driving trucks on the road.

Automation is also widespread in warehouse operations. Amazon is known for its orange Kiva robots, which transport shelving and bins to workers who then pick the products. Several new startups are also poised to enter and transform the warehouse robot space. San Jose-based company Fetch Robotics has created industrial robots that simplify warehouse product handling by following pickers to catch their selected items.

Fetch Robotics spokesman Tim Smith explains it this way:

Our robots are almost like moving pallets, he said. They dont necessarily replace jobs, but they can do the worst part of a job.

A Fetch device can autonomously deliver items to wherever they need to go in the building. That eliminates the need for an employee to walk miles and miles throughout the day to deliver the products.

A map of the environment is created when a robot is installed. That takes a few hours and it takes two to three days to get the system up and running, Smith said. We have about 15 customers all over the world. One of our U.S. locations is in Livermore and others are in Asia and Europe.

The LAEDC report also notes that delivery drones are being readied by several companies, including Amazon, Google and UPS to make deliveries to remote areas or areas with heavy traffic congestion more efficient.

But drones without direct supervision of a person are not currently legal in the U.S. Until they are, delivery drones will still require a human component.

Technology isnt the only game changer in the trade and logistics sector. Labor issues, including disruptions and domestic outsourcing, have the potential to negatively affect the Southern California-based industry in terms of growth for trade volumes and wages, the report said.

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Trade, logistics support many of Southern California's good paying jobs but automation is coming - The Pasadena Star-News

Rockwell Automation has touted its Connected Enterprise concept for some time. Just a few years ago the focus was connecting plant floor data to the enterprise and applying business analytics. Last year, the vision was on connecting silos of information to extract value from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). This year, its all about delivering context to people and analytics to edge devices.

Rockwell Automation TechED kicked off this week in Orlando, Fla., with a presentation by company executives outlining the big picture trendssuch as the convergence of IT and OT, the skills gap and a growing middle class in emerging marketsand how all of this impacts the digital enterprise.

We talk a lot about the technology being applicable horizontally across a wide variety of industries, but remember, everyone starts at a different place, said Blake Moret, President and CEO of Rockwell Automation. You dont bring the connected enterprise to life unless you describe and deliver value in the specific language of the customer.

Given the complexity of every manufacturers operation, which often sits on top of legacy control equipment, Rockwell is delivering new ways to simplify the access to dataand to speak their unique language. It starts with basic smart products at level 0 and 1 where data is created as a natural byproduct of the control process, and turning it into useful information, Moret said.

But it doesnt stop there because the ability to collect and analyze data must be scalable to reach all levels of the architecture. To that end, Rockwell has created an IIoT infrastructure over the last few years, and now it is working on a scalable information platform on top of that.

Specifically, Rockwell highlighted several new offerings, starting with FactoryTalk Analytics for Devices, an appliance that hooks up to existing control systems to find out how healthy the devices on the network are without disrupting performance. Plant floor teams then gain access to specific calls-to-action, instant device displays and an advanced machine-learning-based chat bot, which are all available from within the appliance.

The appliance learns what is important to users by continuously analyzing the devices on the network and delivering recommendations to help maintenance and engineering teams prevent unplanned downtime and repair systems more quickly.

If a device is important to me I can swipe right and [it] sees that its important, or swipe left if its not important, explained Ted Hill, Rockwells director of software product management. If I swipe left enough it will stop sending me action reports.

The built-in chat bot, called Shelby, is there to fetch information, much like an intelligent assistant. Built on the Microsoft bot framework and cognitive services, it will get smarter over time, Hill said.

In addition, a new edition of the FactoryTalk TeamONE app is focused on reducing mean time to repair (MTTR). TeamONE turns your phone into a smart node that requires no server or device-to-cloud gateway to enable collaboration between team members. The new release, dubbed the Standard Edition, adds an alarm module, enabling teams to collaborate with live alarm details. This gives users the ability to easily view all active alarms. They can also view, share and post new details, delivering better team collaboration by adding context with alarm information. Alarms requiring immediate action can be shared with specific team members or posted to the entire team for group management and resolution.

And, while there are many other technologies on display this week in Orlando, one other product worth noting is Rockwells ThinManager, technology the company acquired last year when it bought Automation Control Products (ACP).

ThinManager centralizes the management and visualization of content and streamlines workflows while allowing users to reduce hardware operation and maintenance costs. As a thin client with information centralized and managed at the server, content becomes an information layer that delivers only what the operator needs to see. For example, an engineer on a service call will log into any terminal on the plant floor and the work instructions that are tied to his role and the job are served up without having to launch different applications.

It is the ability to deliver content running on the server and making it available based on the location or user credentials, said Chirayu Shah, Rockwells marketing manager for HMI and Information Software.

The reference to location is important as ThinManager uses proprietary technology called Relevance that adds a layer of security not available on a traditional mobile HMI device. An HMI will stay open until the session expires, Shah explained, but Relevance uses geofencing technology that will only allow the user to look at the app that is specific to that part of the room. It is controlling what you see based on the location, Shah said.

Rockwell representatives were showing all of these applications in live and in action on stage to demonstrate these technologies are ready. All a company needs now is a plan to take the next steps to bring the connected enterprise to life, said Moret.

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Simple Ways to Dig into the Data - Automation World

Google's cloud thought it was out of memory for a couple of hours last week.

The outage wasn't a biggie it hit last Wednesday, June 7th, and meant that 7.7% of active applications on the Google App Engine service experienced severely elevated latency; requests that typically take under 500ms to serve were taking many minutes. Google says users would have seen timeout errors or waited a while for apps to do their thing.

The cause? Google says The incident was triggered by an increase in memory usage across all App Engine appservers in a datacenter in us-central. Those servers are ... responsible for creating instances to service requests for App Engine applications and if their memory usage increases to unsustainable levels they shut down some instances so that they can be rescheduled on other appservers in order to balance out the memory requirements across the datacenter.

Fair enough: a sick server offloading workloads sounds reasonable. But Google says that when instances are moved around it puts some extra load on servers' CPUS, which isn't usually a problem that users notice. But in isolated cases when there's lots of other traffic hitting the same data centre, things can get tricky.

And that's what happened during the June 7th incident: Google says increased load and memory requirement from scheduling new instances combined with rescheduling instances from appservers with high memory usage resulted in most appservers being considered 'busy' by the master scheduler.

Requests to reschedule instances needed to wait for an available instance to either be transferred or created before they were able to be serviced, which results in the increased latency seen at the app level.

Interestingly, Google's remediation actions for the problem mention re-evaluating the resource distribution in the us-central datacenters where App Engine instances are hosted. Those are The Register's italics, because the passage suggests Google's bit barns have different resource levels and individual quirks rather than relying on homogenous building blocks.

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Google cloud browned out after automation snag struck - The Register

A few years ago, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.s leaders took a hard look at how the bank carries out initial public offerings. They mapped 127 steps in every deal, then set out to see how many could be done by computers instead of people.

The answer so far: about half.

Just 21 months after the firm disclosed its plan to re-engineer one of Wall Streets most lucrative businesses, the project has found ways to eliminate thousands of hours of work long performed by humans. A computer-based interface called Deal Link has replaced informal checklists that were once tended and passed down between generations of rainmakers. It now arranges and tracks legal and compliance reviews, fills in forms and generates reports.

The initiatives progress -- describedby senior Goldman Sachs executives in recent interviews -- shows how quickly big investment banks may be able to automate tasks once beyond the reach of computers. The industry is under intense pressure to improve profitability, while contending with young workers less willing to put in 18-hour days. At Goldman Sachs, managers say theyre looking to new technology to free up junior bankers in particular, letting them focus on more satisfying work. That could help slow an exodus of talent to private equity firms, tech titans like Google and hot startups.

The review is the brainchild of Goldman Sachs banker George Lee. Long an adviser and confidant to the Silicon Valley elite, Lee became chief information officer for the investment-banking division three years ago. Since then, hes focused on two key goals: digitizing bankers workflow and using technology to enhance their advice to clients.

Source: The Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The firm has expressed interest in automating parts of the IPO process for years -- Martin Chavez mentioned it publicly as early as September 2015, when speaking as chief information officer -- but it has never before detailed the efforts publicly in such depth.

In the beginning, Lee and his team took aim at the most obvious steps for disruption: the routine phone calls, emails and tasks that young bankers plow through at the beginning of every IPO. That included phoning the compliance department to look for potential conflicts, contacting legal to assign lawyers and compiling an organizational book for meetings.

Now thats all done with the click of a mouse in the new application, which features a step-by-step guide replacing ad hoc training materials and word-of-mouth advice. Hot links trigger processes or fill in forms. Information used across multiple forms is populated automatically.

The firm also streamlined the way that it delivers updates to clients about IPO orders, sending instantaneous details about pricing, size and timing to a phone or tablet application, Lee said in an interview. In the past, that would have been a static report that Goldman Sachs emailed or faxed to the clients hotel at the end of the day.

The bank soon concluded the focus on IPOs was too narrow, and it turned attention to other deals, such as corporate mergers and bond sales. To date, more than 150 steps have been mapped across various investment-banking transactions handled by the 2,500 bankers in the division. Hundreds of hours initially saved on IPOs swelled into the thousands as the project grew.

What we are trying to do is slowly but surely pick off the ones that are the most redundant, the most repetitive, the most labor-intensive, and automate them so that you save time, Lee said.

Goldman Sachs has a history of innovating to earn more from IPOs. In the 1940s and 50s, senior partner Sidney Weinberg elevated relationship banking to a new level, eventually working personally with the Ford family for years to take their carmaker public, running what was then the biggest-ever IPO. That built the banks franchise. In 1984, when Eric Dobkin was asked to improve its ninth-place ranking in stock underwriting, he pushed to sell large blocks of new shares to institutional investors. The strategy replaced a longstanding model relying on thousands of regional brokers to peddle stock to retail investors. The modern IPO market was born.

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Goldman Sachs ranks No. 6 this year among managers of global IPOs, its worst position in the league tables since 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. For banks, its a particularly desirable business, with fees averaging about 7 percent on mid-size transactions in the U.S. in recent years, according to research by Jay Ritter, a professor at University of Floridas business school. The average fee earned for selling U.S. investment-grade bonds last year was half a percent.

Goldmans latest effort has mainly helped to erase grunt work for analysts and associates, the bottom rungs.In the lofty realms of Wall Street, theyre relatively cheap, said Brad Hintz, a former chief financial officer at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and top-ranked research analyst.

(Associates working in equity capital markets at top Wall Street banks typically earned about $326,000 last year, according to a survey by recruiter Options Group. But that compares with $494,000 for vice presidents and $860,000 for directors.)

Terminating a significant number of bankers from the lower tiers to save money could create new problems in the long run, Hintz said, because banks replenish their senior ranks by promoting from that pool. It would risk ossification, he said.

Instead, the new system lets those employees pursue more productive work,Lee said. They can help draft filings used to communicate with investors and register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, shape marketing strategy or spend more time talking with clients. Theres been no impact on headcount or hiring, according to the firm.

Goldman Sachss approach may seem obvious, but its cutting edge for Wall Street. The conventional wisdom has long been that investment banking was too reliant on human-to-human interactions, and that trading was easier to automate. Banks also lacked investment dollars for new projects as they battled fines, investigations and revenue pressures after the financial crisis.

Thats beginning to change. JPMorgan Chase & Co. has used machine learning to predict when clients might need to raise capital through a secondary equity offering. And startups abound. Kognetics, for example, uses a similar system to find and catalog data to identify attractive acquisition candidates in the tech industry.

There is an ecosystem pushing toward more automation, said Matthew Dixon, an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technologys business school.

Read more: JPMorgan marshals an army of developers to automate finance

As a result, Wall Streets online chat rooms are rife with young workers worrying about their future -- and rebuttals from optimists who predict relationship banking will largely be immune to automation.

Lee insists that, at least for the foreseeable future, theres plenty of demand for uniquely human ideas. For anyone at Goldman Sachs who may have such a concern, he has a simple answer. "Our strategy is to elevate the activity and impact of bankers, he said. Not replace it.

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Goldman Set Out to Automate IPOs and It Has Come Far, Really ... - Bloomberg