The era of improving plant performance and profitability through efficiency—that is by cutting costs—is over. So stated Emerson Automation Solutions executive president Mike Train while kicking off the 2017 edition of Emerson Global Users Exchange in Minneapolis.
“The past 30 years have brought us fantastic advances in the manufacturing sector, including greater operating efficiencies enabled by automation,” said Train. “But the incremental benefits gained are diminishing. The pressure is on industry leaders to take the next step to the game-changing performance made possible by digitally empowering the workforce.”
Emerson has researched industry performance and drew a profile of Top Quartile industry performers – those in the top 25 percent of performance among their peers – Emerson has identified five essential competencies as critical to realize the value of “digital transformation”:
• Automated Workflow: Eliminate repetitive tasks and streamline standard operations to focus personnel on exceptions and other opportunities that require human intervention
• Decision Support: Leverage analytics and embedded expertise to provide actionable insights that reduce complexity and enable higher quality, faster decision-making
• Workforce Upskilling: Identify approaches that empower workers to acquire knowledge or experience faster and more effectively, to support higher-level and collaborative decision-making
• Mobility: Provide secure, on-demand access to information and expertise regardless of location, enabling collaborative workflows
• Change Management: Combine strategies, processes, tools and expertise that, in the right combination, simplify and accelerate the institutionalization of operational best practices
As always, this is a huge customer conference. There is abundant energy. Informal networking occurred all over the place. At this time, Emerson is the most vibrant of the companies in this area. It’ll be interesting to watch how, or if, business continues to grow from the company’s continued vision of industry.
More coming. Gotta listen to the next speaker.
