Monthly Archives: August 2017

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story originally ran in the News and Tribune's "Progress" publication earlier in 2017.

SOUTHERN INDIANA Despite what you may have heard, manufacturing is doing just fine in Indiana and the United States as a whole in terms of output, anyway.

National manufacturing production was at one of its highest points ever in 2015 even when adjusted for inflation, according to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Similarly, Indianas manufacturing GDP was at it highest in 2015 since at least 1997 making up 30 percent of the states total GDP, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Despite this, the country has lost 7 million manufacturing jobs since employment peaked in 1979. Indiana also had fewer manufacturing jobs in 2014 with 349,425 workers than it had seen in the pre-recession years.

That, says Michael Hicks, is due to automation.

Hicks is the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University. His centers 2015 study, authored by him and Srikant Devaraj, estimates that 88 percent of the United States lost manufacturing jobs are due to the replacement of humans by technology.

That sounds quite accurate, actually, said Uric Dufrene, the Sanders Chair in Business at Indiana University Southeast.

Trade, another oft-cited reason for fewer manufacturing jobs, has resulted in the loss of many especially in the textiles industry but Hicks and other economists such as Dufrene say automation has overshadowed the effects of a more global economy.

Its not expected to get much better, either, with a 2015 study from the Boston Consulting Group predicting that 1.2 million advanced robots will be introduced to American industry by 2025 as prices for the technology lower. Of course, automation isnt just about robots. It presents itself in subtler ways, too. Radio frequency identification, for example, cuts down on the number of people needed to find parts in a warehouse, Hicks said.

Automation in Southern Indiana

So how is automation affecting manufacturers in Clark and Floyd counties, where 17 percent of all jobs in the area stem from their business?

Dufrenes answer to that question is that automation is probably not affecting a lot right now in terms of overall employment, that is.

The area is seeing a boom in manufacturing because of places like River Ridge Commerce Center, where theres 6,000 acres of land set aside just for industry. Dufrene thinks incoming manufacturers will make up for whatever jobs are lost to technology.

Hicks has a different point of view. While he said Southern Indiana is an attractive place to locate a factory, he believes that the area will eventually begin to follow the national employment trends.

At some point, even Dufrene says that's possible maybe when River Ridge is fully developed.

Its hard to go out that far, he said.

Automation has, however, affected the types of manufacturing jobs that are available in Southern Indiana.

A different kind of factory worker

Bob Owings is the owner of Owings Patterns in Sellersburg and the chairman of One Southern Indianas Metro Manufacturing Alliance.

When his father started the business over 40 years ago, pattern making was a much different industry than it is today. Much of the work was done by hand and took hours.

As technology evolved, so has Owings Patterns.

Now, the business employees design plastic molds on computer software, another worker programs a machine to create that mold, and even more employees, called CNC operators, control those machines with their own computer.

Robots might have replaced some manufacturing jobs, Owings admits, but not all of them.

Theres 15 people designing that robot, he said. Theres another guy programming that robot. Theres two or three guys maintaining that robot. And oh, theres still a guy operating that robot. So really automation may have created five to seven jobs. It creates a different type of job.

Hicks agrees that some jobs are being created by new manufacturing technology. Many of those jobs, however, require extra education. The days of low-skilled workers making a middle-class salary?

Theyre done with, he said.

That doesnt mean there are people lining up to take those jobs even though the average one in Clark, Crawford, Floyd, Harrison, Scott and Washington counties pays $65,398.

Manufacturers in the area have reported problems to 1si with finding the skilled employees they need to fill their jobs. There are several programs and groups in the area dedicated to filling this gap.

Region 10 WorkOne and Ivy Tech in Sellersburg work together on manufacturing education programs for adults. Prosser Career Education Center in New Albany also has manufacturing classes for both high school students and adults.

Finally, Greater Clark County Schools was recently designated a Ford Next Generation Learning community, meaning all students curriculums will eventually be designed around careers that might include manufacturing. The school system is also the fiscal agent for a $7.7 million grant from the DWD for Clark, Floyd and Harrison county high schools that involves preparing more students for manufacturing careers.

Tying everything together is 1si, which hired a director of talent and workforce development in January to be the employer voice for the areas initiatives.

Hicks is skeptical of most workforce development initiatives. Too often, he said, theyre focused on employers' immediate needs. The jobs that need filled now could be obsolete in a few years.

Its better to teach students how to be adaptable, Hicks said. Dufrene added to that argument, saying that investing in a strong K-12 system and a basic STEM education is important, too.

The shiny side of automation

Automation, for all its affect on the labor market, isnt necessarily a bad thing, Hicks said.

For one, it helps businesses like Owings Patterns thrive.

We have been required to embrace technology and automation to increase our efficiencies, Owings said. We expand our business and expand our opportunities by using technology and automation.

And in the case of Owings Patterns, that has meant hiring more people. Twenty-five years ago, the business had five employees. Now, it has 25.

No one should want factories to be the way they were in the old days, anyway, Hicks said. With higher skilled employees comes better pay and better working conditions.

We are not afraid of automation, Owings said.

Excerpt from:

Automation changing jobs nationwide and in Southern Indiana - Evening News and Tribune

Joe Fuller, VP & CIO, Dominion Enterprises, Joe Fuller is CIO at Dominion Enterprises (formerly Trader Publishing Company), the Norfolk, VA based media and marketing company which operates Homes...More>>

In an old parable a frog is placed in tepid water whose temperature is gradually and slowly raised to the boiling point. As the water gets warmer, instead of recognizing peril, the frog falls into a calm stupor and is boiled to death. If youre a CIO, the water youre getting comfortable in is called automation.

Elon Musk recently predicted that automation will eliminate so many jobs that governments will be forced to pay a universal basic income to each and every citizen, regardless of their work status. McDonalds stock just hit an all time high after announcing that it will replace human cashiers with kiosks in 2500 restaurants. Amazons Jeff Bezos has over a thousand people dedicated to their Alexa artificial intelligence platform. Mark Zuckerberg recently told graduating Harvard students that millions of jobs are about to be replaced by things like self-driving cars and trucks. The consensus is clear: automation is going to drastically reduce certain types of jobs. What does this mean for the CIO?

Lets look at where you are. I bet you jumped on the virtualization bandwagon as soon as you realized how much time and money could be saved compared to traditional rack-and-stack systems administration. You probably embraced agile development and you have at least experimented with DevOps. You may have deployed automated patch management. You might even be exploring ways to automate by pushing computing jobs to public cloud providers and beyond cloud providers. Your CEO and CFO partners have certainly encouraged you to automate, which has sped up IT delivery and reduced IT costs. With automation, youve probably improved your groups performance without cutting staff or spending more on IT. It seems everyone is winning with automation, so wheres the rub?

Were worshiping at the automation altar and unconsciously shunning the good IT people we have fostered our whole careers

As CIO, theres a big insidious problem warming up your kettle as you leverage automation. Youve encouraged your people to seek efficiency and automation and drive lower expenses. You and your team can point to hard dollars saved whenever one of these automation mini-projects goes live. Our company has seen its digital operations grow at about a 25 percent annual clip since 2009 at the expense of traditional operations. But weve actually reduced our operating expenses through automation and the normal influence of Moores law. During this time, weve reduced staff slightly through attrition. We havent been too worried about that because the automation really does seem to eliminate the need for bodies. But theres a big problem sneaking up on us: were losing our mojo.

What do I mean by losing our mojo? Were worshiping at the automation altar and unconsciously shunning the good IT people we have fostered our whole careers. These people are creative. They are brilliant. They love to solve problems. They love to build and re-build to make things better. They hate when things break but they love fixing things when they break. They prefer the command line to a GUI interface. And were losing them. They get that automation is a good thing and embrace eliminating mundane tasks. They know that reducing power consumption by 45% in the data center is good for everyone. They like being the Maytag repairman when its their turn to be on call. But they are bored. They are scared. They are confused about where the industry is going and concerned they too will be obsolete like loading an operating system on a stand-alone server. They have been looking for jobs that offer more challenge, but the reality is that your shop is pretty much the same as IT shops everywhere.

If youre like me, youve looked into the future and seen incomprehensibly massive Amazon, Microsoft and Google data centers in the deserts of the world manned by a handful of security guards who replace the cameras and the water hoses every now and then. You dont see the engineers who designed the systems or the R&D team working on the Gen 7 data center that doesnt even need those water hoses. They are barren, hot places that no humans daydream about working in.

Ive painted a bleak picture but take heart. As CIO, you have the power to place humans into this picture and have everything be OK. But you have to change. Your organization must keep chasing automation but you dont have to. You must delegate those tasks to either specific people or to specific times for you and your people. In other words, you have to stop spending all your time thinking tactically about automation and devote time to thinking strategically about innovation. You owe it to yourself and your IT team to check the box on automated operation but demand more of yourself and your team on the strategic front.

How do you do this? Talk to your team. Ask them about their fears. Ask them what they think you all can do to help move the business forward through innovation and not just automation. Go to summits and seminars and encourage your folks to do the same. Take time to allow show-and-tell when everyone gets back. Sponsor hackathons to develop on the latest AI technology. Buy the newest gadgets for your executives and help them actually use them. Solicit new product ideas from every corner of the business (not just IT) and have the ideas be submitted via short, entertaining videos. Identify IT trends and specifically give your IT teams projects related to those trends that are not specifically tied to cost reductions. Embrace the after-hours activities of your team and find ways to let them share the neat things they are doing outside work.

Automation has been a great boon to IT in the last 10 years and it has made us less expensive and more reliable. But we cant lose our greatest asset our smart people. You as CIO are responsible for shifting time and resources to nurture them so we continue to provide maximum value to the businesses we serve. Dont let us get comfortable in this automation pot and suffer the frogs fate.

Read more here:

You're the Frog and Automation is about to Boil You - CIOReview

In a few years, robotic farming equipment will be able to plow and prepare soil while human farmers sleep.

That is what Hokkaido University professor Noboru Noguchi and his team are aiming for as the nations farmers age, with no successors in place.

The improved use of robotics in agriculture will not only reduce manual labor but will enable aging farmers to continue working and focus their time and energy on areas that require their knowledge and experience.

The related technology has been advancing in recent years. Machinery that allows a driver to sit back while it plows the field in straight lines is already on the market.

But unmanned farm machinery would require accurate positioning systems. To date, such machinery has used a combination of GPS, supplied by U.S. satellites, supplemented with data sent from ground-based stations to improve accuracy.

Depending on the lay of the land, however, the machinery occasionally strays up to 10 meters from the plotted path due to GPS systems not always providing completely accurate data.

But on June 1, Japan put its second quasi-zenith satellite, Michibiki No. 2, into orbit to improve the accuracy of the countrys GPS. Two more navigation satellites are set to be launched by the end of 2017 to provide accurate and constant data.

The quasi-zenith system ensures one of the planned four satellites will be above Japan at any one time. When the four Japanese satellites are in operation, the margin of error is expected to be narrowed to a few centimeters.

The agricultural ministry, meanwhile, adopted guidelines in March for autonomous farming machinery. The rules ban self-driving units on regular roads and limit who can enter farmland where the machines are working.

The guidelines prompted leading farm equipment manufacturer Kubota Corp. to start selling advanced self-driving tractors on a trial basis on June 1.

For now, the guidelines cover the use of self-driving machinery under on-site human supervision. But a team of researchers at the Graduate School of Agriculture at Hokkaido University is developing a tractor that can be controlled remotely.

The team is working on a robotic system that automatically observes the surrounding environment, recognizes obstacles and avoids them or halts operation if necessary.

During a recent trial, a team member maneuvered a prototype tractor via a tablet computer. The tractor was equipped with GPS receiver as well as various sensors and other devices. A buzzer went off when it recognized an obstacle and it stopped automatically.

Team leader Noguchi said a planned tractor, capable of autonomously harvesting, leveling ground and flooding rice paddies at night will become available within a few years.

Beginning this autumn, the university team will conduct verification tests on a fully unmanned tractor in a 950-hectare area of land in Hokkaido, taking into consideration actual restrictions such as the use of radio waves and traffic laws.

To put agricultural robots to work, it is important for the people involved, including researchers, engineers and farmers, to allow a process of trial and error to play out, Noguchi said.

Noguchis team is going a step further in a project that will allow farm machines to analyze weather and soil data so they can predict disease and pest infestations. Further, the ability to predict crop yields would enable refined operations such as distributing more fertilizer where needed.

The use of such detailed data can help avoid the wasteful use of fertilizer and agricultural chemicals, improve the efficiency of operations, enhance the safety of agricultural products and contribute to the protection of the environment.

To be sure, automation cannot take over all farming operations.

Shigeru Someya, a large-scale rice grower in Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture, said that while advances in agricultural equipment have made farming more efficient, it has led to a situation where farmers no longer take good care of paddies by themselves.

Ive been taught that rice grows (best) when they hear the footsteps of human beings, Someya said. Looking over (rice paddies on foot) is indispensable.

The key to the future of Japans agriculture may be combining the knowledge of farmers like Someya and farming technology artificial intelligence that analyses and learns from a huge volume of data, and the introduction of robots.

Link:

Japan's farming industry poised for automation revolution - The Japan Times

In todays IT community, automation is quite a buzzword. We hear about it a lotfrom marketing and sales force automation to workload management automation and the automation of software related to business processes. But why is it so important?

Essentially, automation is about taking the traditional computing resources of the business to the next level. Its about taking manual and labor-intensive processes, and changing them so that they no longer require detailed human intervention. Using principles of technology advancement like machine learning and sophisticated algorithms, vendors can offer companies the ability to automate all sorts of key tasks and processes in all kinds of interesting and useful ways.

Who needs automated tasks?Just about any system administrator can benefit from the principle of automation. Automating tasks frees up time for key people to turn their attention to other important aspects of running a business.

For example, in a virtualized network environment, someone who was spending their time getting after every detail of virtual machine performance and workload management could instead be looking at the big picture and how to scale the system efficiently, while automation software takes care of those other little details in the background.

For a look at how diverse automation benefits can be, think of someone who is running software or even mechanical hardware processes in a manufacturing business. If theres a software process leading to production tagging, quality assurance or some other area of a business process, automation can again take that work out of the human managers hands and perform it automatically, so that the human worker can go do other things.

Automation tools.Some of the best automation tools have to do a managing applications in an enterprise environment. A tool called Zapier helps to integrate apps easily, and monitor automated data that flows between them. It helps to provide pre-built processes that can be repeated without reinventing the wheel.

Other tools like IFTTT help automate the process of using applets for Java-based web development. The scope of applications for these types of tools is profound by connecting this type of automation to Apple, Android or other platforms, human managers get the power of adaptive automation assistance in their back pockets.

Another tool called Stackify also helps human users in a variety of ways. Stackify can help solve application performance issues, find hidden exceptions, or help to synchronize business activities where data resolution is ultimately important.

For example, think about a reservation or booking system or a ticketing system that uses a variety of applications. Companies will be trying to assess how data flows between these applications when scaling. They want product support, and they want an engaged model for fixing bugs and glitches.

In these types of cases, using Stackify Retrace can help make problem-solving more proactive. Its not just a question of providing notifications when somethings wrong its an overall analysis of the applications as theyre developing, to catch any issues. A principle called DevOps combines the words development and operations it makes the development process more fluid and agile. It helps to automate some of the processes of bringing applications into full swing. These are the kinds of processes that Stackify supports to offer developers and others more automation assistance.

Companies that are not familiar with this kind of functionality should be thinking about how to integrate automation into business processes. Whether its a product or service business, and whether the process relates to manufacturing or customer connections, numerous types of automation can really improve business outcomes.

AJ has lead many automation projects and has consistently managed to provide value through removing manual work out of different processes. In his spare time, he likes to cover tech and automation related topics and share his know-how.

Read the rest here:

The rise of automation: Why coding is becoming a job for everyone - SDTimes.com