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Obsolescence not scary enough? If you ever wanted to envision a collective shoulder shrug, there may be no better way than to read this: Many of today’s manufacturing plant process automation systems could suddenly fail with costly consequences. Across the industry, companies are familiar with the threat of obsolescence. Few are prepared for it. While sound reasons for this exist, such as budget, one rather fuzzy and unspoken one may be at work. Could it be the threat obsolescence just isn’t scary enough? After all, the way you feel about something can profoundly influence your perception of risk. If you don’t really perceive that obsolescence will cause imminent harm, a shoulder shrug may be all you can muster. When people calculate risk, they rely more on feeling than fact (Source: Peters, Burraston, and Mertz; OSU). It’s hard to take action and prepare for a risk if we don’t feel it’s […]

Intelligent automation – the final frontier. People make mistakes. But when people in feed mills make mistakes, the results are always costly. It’s just a matter of degree. As feed mills move toward an ever-higher level of automation, people are being taken out of the equation. Facilities have begun operating with almost no direct labor, aside from people who maintain equipment and manage through uncommon situations that may arise. Those people aren’t in the mill monitoring equipment. They’ve shut off the lights and left, returning only if needed to fix equipment or perform normal maintenance. This is “lights-out” automation, the final frontier in process automation. Lights-out is automation to the fullest possible level. When you’re at lights out, your plant floor operates on its own, maintaining the established level of product quality and preventing product waste. No one has to hover over equipment, watching for problems that might arise. Although […]