Podcast Justifying IoT Investments and Investing in Training

Podcast Justifying IoT Investments and Investing in Training

Slowly catching up with podcast / video (you can see these on my YouTube channel and subscribe on YouTube or iTunes) reports on my travels. While I was at the Emerson Global Users Exchange, I sat in a panel session led by Mike Boudreaux on IoT. The session was packed–as are all IoT sessions at conferences.

During Q&A from the audience, people were curious about how to justify IoT projects. Good answers from end user Tom Madilao of Chevron in Singapore and Peter Zornio, CTO of Emerson Automation. Essentially target a proof of concept application with a defined benefit.

Emerson took us on a tour of a new facility with a $10 million training facility during the week. Fascinating. Wish I could have videoed it–but photos were not allowed.

 

Podcast Justifying IoT Investments and Investing in Training

Interactive Plant Environment Immersive Training Facility

Part of the media / analyst program at Emerson Global User Exchange 2017 was a tour of a manufacturing facility and state-of-the-art (or beyond) training center. The Shakopee, MN facility includes final assembly of pressure sensors, product design (which we didn’t see), and an Interactive Plant Environment training center. The latter itself is a $10 million investment. This is one of two (Charlotte, NC being the other) while a third is planned in Houston.

The Interactive Plant Environment training center includes a classroom and a production facility. The facility includes tanks and pipes, valves, sensors and instrumentation, water and air. No steam or corrosive chemicals, of course. It helps customers and students simulate real life process conditions through hands-on learning in a safe environment. The IPE boasts a breadth of Emerson products where students can increase skills and knowledge through real-life scenario-based labs. Students are taught an aspect of instrumentation and then given a work order. They don hardhat, safety glasses, steel-toed shoes and enter the “plant” to perform the work—whether it be trouble shooting or calibration or whatever.

Students have the opportunity to better understand best practices and troubleshooting techniques from the mentorship of certified Emerson instructors. It is as if they are immersed in a typical plant environment (minus smells and mud) where they can replicate the most common, as well as unexpected, operational scenarios.

This is a great example of forward thinking in the training field. It is also impressive that Emerson continues to make these investments. Emerson alone among its competitors at this time is showing momentum and growth.

The first thing we saw past the lobby was a Collaboration Center. Looking like a high-tech conference room, this Center enables customers to learn to manage remote operations and interact with experts located anywhere in the world. There is one display for video conferencing. Another digital wall includes capability to display a variety of information that people in the room can interact with. The displays may include weather maps with maps of facilities. Or perhaps a “heat map” of wireless installations. This should be a great productivity booster.

Production facility is an excellent example of Lean Manufacturing. We saw an excellent Kanban system as well as many other examples of the visual factory, 5S, and more. I just love seeing the spreading adoption of lean. It’s great for workers, as well as, great for the bottom line.

Podcast Justifying IoT Investments and Investing in Training

Next Generation Workforce: Concern or Opportunity

How much should we worry about the next generation manufacturing workforce? An email came through late last week from an organization that I’d heard of but never had any dealings with—Junior Achievement. Press release was titled, “Labor Day Blues: Three-in-Four Parents and Teens Concerned Global Competition and Automation will Make it Difficult for Next Generation to Have a Successful Job/Career”.

A new survey from Junior Achievement USA (JA) shows that 77 percent of parents are “concerned” about their children’s ability to have a successful job or career as adults in light of global competition and automation. The same percentage (77%) of teens said they share similar concerns about having a successful job or career in the future because of global competition and automation. The survey of 1,204 parents of school-aged students and 1,000 teens was conducted by ORC International for JA.

So I thought, this is interesting, but is it new? My parents were worried about my future employability when I graduated from high school a long, long time ago. I probably had some concern about my kids, but I’m generally more optimistic and have higher expectations, I guess, than others. (They are both doing well.)

Just wondered if they had run this survey every year for the past 50 would there be any trend? Or, are they just rushing to capitalize on the current state of media who relishes negative news?

Then I thought about some (not all) parents I run into through my soccer work. I’ve met the “helicopter parent”. They have kids who referee soccer, too. I’d imagine parents with that mindset would be concerned—probably for the rest of their lives.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t let my optimism get in the way of preparation. The JA CEO is on the right track here.

“Education and skills are going to be critical for the next generation’s success in an ever-changing workplace,” said Jack Kosakowski, CEO of Junior Achievement USA. “Many of the entry-level jobs we know today won’t be around in the next decade, and many of the jobs of tomorrow haven’t even been conceived of yet. It’s important we encourage our young people to explore post-secondary education, whether that be a university, community college, or a technical or trade school. Having some level of technical training is going to be critical for future career success. A high school diploma or GED just won’t be enough for many jobs.”

The Future Workforce Survey

In the survey, nearly half (45%) of parents said that they were “extremely or very” concerned about their children’s prospects for future employment, while almost as many teens (40%) had the same level of concern.

The survey was conducted in conjunction with the fall rollout of Junior Achievement’s work- and career-readiness programs. For more detail on these and other JA programs, visit JA’s programs page.

Methodology

This report presents the findings of ORC International’s Online and Youth CARAVAN surveys conducted among a sample of 1,204 parents of school-aged children and 1,000 13-17 year- olds.  These surveys were conducted live from June 29 to July 6, 2017, for the parents’ portion and from July 11 to July 16, 2017, for the teens’ portion.

Respondents for this survey are selected from among those who have volunteered to participate in online surveys and polls.  Because the sample is based on those who initially self-selected for participation, no estimates of sampling error can be calculated.  All sample surveys and polls may be subject to multiple sources of error, including, but not limited to sampling error, coverage error, error associated with nonresponse, error associated with question-wording and response options.

About JA

Junior Achievement is the world’s largest organization dedicated to giving young people the knowledge and skills they need to own their economic success, plan for their future, and make smart academic and economic choices. JA programs are delivered by corporate and community volunteers, and provide relevant, hands-on experiences that give students from kindergarten through high school knowledge and skills in financial literacy, work readiness, and entrepreneurship. Today, JA reaches 4.8 million students per year in 109 markets across the United States, with an additional 5.6 million students served by operations in more than 100 countries worldwide.

–Gary Mintchell

Podcast Justifying IoT Investments and Investing in Training

Dell Technologies Research On Human Machine Partnership Report Part Two

Human-Machine Partnership. I love that phrase. It is in the title of the recent research report from the Institute for the Future and Dell Technologies. I wrote about the technology side of the report in my last post. This post will highlight the human and partnership sides of the report.

Takeaway: The way we work with technology in the near future will evolve into a partnership that can enhance human training and education building a workforce that is effective and focused on continual learning.

Challenge: The optimism in the report needs to be tempered by the question—will this only benefit the few self-motivated youth and those whose parents push them? How can we remake our institutional education (which is now global) such that we can provide mentors and a different way of motivating kids and young adults (as well as us old guys) into continual and self-paced learning?

From the report:

Recent conversations, reports, and articles about the intersection of emerging technologies and society have tended to promote one of two extreme perspectives about the future: the anxiety-driven issue of technological unemployment or the optimistic view of tech-enabled panaceas for all social and environmental ills. Perhaps a more useful conversation would focus on what the new relationship between technology and society could look like, and what needs to be considered to prepare accordingly. By framing the relationship between humans and machines as a partnership, we can begin to build capacity in machines to improve their understanding of humans, and in society and organizations, so that more of us are prepared to engage meaningfully with emerging technologies.

However, it would be a fallacy to assume that technology is making human effort redundant. It’s doubtful that computers will have fully mastered the fundamental, instinctive skills of intuition, judgment, and emotional intelligence that humans value by 2030. Over the next decade, partnering with machines will help humans transcend their limitations.

Human-machine partnerships will enable people to find and act on information without interference of emotions or external bias, while also exercising human judgment where appropriate. They’ll learn to team up with technologies integrated with machine learning tools to help activate and deactivate the resources they need to manage their daily lives. And they’ll partner with AR/VR technologies to develop necessary work skills, blending experiential media with human judgement to perform well at work.

Their ability to evaluate talent will also be bolstered by VR/AR technology, which will increase managers’ ability to evaluate a worker’s aptitude for gaining new knowledge or learning new skills and applying this knowledge to a new scenario.

By 2030, populations’ needs and resources will be orchestrated by self-learning, digital technologies, allowing humans to take the role of digital resource conductors. Technology will work as an extension of people, helping orchestrate, manage, and automate many day-to-day activities. And because the technology will be woven into everyone’s lives (some will even be implanted), and personalized to the individual, some needs will be met often before people even realize they have them. These digital technologies will be integrated with machine learning to create a population of digital orchestration systems, harnessing technology to arrange and direct resources to produce a desired result.

By 2030, many will be savvy digital orchestra conductors, relying on their suite of personal technologies, including voice-enabled connected devices, wearables, and implantables; to infer intent from their patterns and relationships, and activate and deactivate resources accordingly.

By 2030, expectations of work will reset and the landscape for organizations will be redrawn, as the process of finding work gets flipped on its head. As an extension of what is often referred to as the ‘gig economy’ today, organizations will begin to automate how they source work and teams, breaking up work into tasks, and seeking out the best talent for a task.

As the transfer of knowledge will be increasingly offloaded to emerging technologies, individuals will shoulder the burden of using these new technologies to acquire necessary skills to demonstrate proficiency. As a result, people will need to know how to access information and learn through immersive and experimental media such as AR and VR. (Big fear, can we restructure education so that we lessen the divide between digital haves and have nots? Or do we continue to stratify society?

INDIVIDUAL SKILLS & TRAITS

  • Contextualized intelligence: nuanced understanding of culture, society, business, and people
  • Entrepreneurial mindset: applying creativity, learning agility, and an enterprising attitude to find workarounds and circumvent constraints
  • Personal brand cultivation: a searchable and favorable digital identity as basic work hygiene
  • Automation literacy: the nimble ability to integrate lightweight automation tools into one’s own work and home life
  • Computational sensemaking: ability to derive meaning from blended machine and human-based outputs

ORGANIZATIONAL SKILLS & TRAITS

  • Business-driven security: embed security as a business strategy
  • Eliminate latencies: exceed consumer expectations for real-time delivery
  • Algorithmic branding: ensure algorithms align with organizational values
  • Diversifying value of work: reset assumptions behind the value of work
  • Inspire innovation: incent workers to deviate from machine-learned systems

 

Manufacturing Jobs In America-Part 2

Manufacturing Jobs In America-Part 2

Mobile Workers in Production PlantManufacturing jobs—will they be people or robots? Whenever I am presented with an either/or I tend to think why not both or neither. Four choices, not two. In this case, three choices since neither means no manufacturing. And every country on God’s good Earth wants manufacturing. Just check out all the government initiatives underway.

Within the past week, I’ve seen two articles in local newspapers—The Sidney Daily News and The Dayton Daily News—parroting the New York Times article about how robots take jobs away from people.

This week was the biennial edition of Automate—the trade show of Association for Advancing Automation (A3). A3 released a white paper for the show, and I had a chance to sit with two association executives, Bob Doyle and Alex Shikany, to discuss the findings and analysis leading up to the white paper Work in the Automation Age: Sustainable Careers Today and Into the Future.

“As a representative of over 1,000 companies and organizations making up the automation ecosystem, A3 believes it is critically important to clear up some of the confusion surrounding the relationship between automation and jobs,” said Jeff Burnstein, A3 president quoted in the press release. An admirable goal.

My take is that I agree with pretty much everything they found with one addition—I still believe that manufacturing enterprise executives bear much blame for problems with manufacturing in America. Such things as management-by-spreadsheet, no passion for products or customers, faddish reactions (such as unintelligent offshoring), and lack of investment.

Technology Makes Lives Better

We discussed that humans have been developing technology to increase production and make lives better probably since there were humans on earth. Recent discussions that cover only the past 250 years or so with technology advancing from steam to electricity to IT-driven human prosperity and quality of life have all advanced.

Let’s look at a summary of findings. Here are some surprising facts.

Manufacturing Jobs

More robots, more jobs.

As employers add automation technologies such as robots, job titles and tasks are changing, but the number of jobs continues to rise. New technologies allow companies to become more productive and create higher quality products in a safer environment for their employees. This allows them to be more competitive in the global marketplace and grow their business. We see this in the statistics: over the seven-year period from 2010 to 2016, 136,748 robots were shipped to US customers—the most in any seven-year period in the US robotics industry. In that same time period, manufacturing employment increased by 894,000 and the US unemployment rate decreased from 9.8% in 2010 to 4.7% in 2016.

Specifically looking at two companies, Amazon had more than 45,000 employees when it introduced robots in 2014. While the company continues to add robots to its operations, it has grown to over 90,000 employees, with a drive to hire more than 100,000 new people by the end of 2018. Similarly, General Motors grew from 80,000 US employees in 2012 to 105,000 in 2016, while increasing the number of new US robot applications by about 10,000. We see similar results from multi-national companies with thousands of employees, to small manufacturing companies.

The skills gap and its impact.

Skilled workers are key to companies’ success and countries’ economic development. Employers rank the availability of highly skilled workers who facilitate a shift toward innovation and advanced manufacturing as the most critical driver of global competitiveness. But studies show an increasing skills gap with as many as two million jobs going unfilled in the manufacturing industry alone in the next decade. Fully 80% of manufacturers report a shortage of qualified applicants for skilled production positions, and the shortage could cost US manufacturers 11% of their annual earnings.

Changing job titles reflect changing tasks.

In the automation age, as in the computer age before it, job titles shift to reflect the impact of technology. A recent study concluded that occupations that have 10% more new job titles grow 5% faster. Just as we saw the rise of entire industries around previously unheard-of job titles in cloud services, mobile apps, social media, and more, we’re seeing similar shifts in the automation age. As lower-level tasks are automated with advanced technologies such as robots, new job titles and industries arise across nearly every economic sector.

Supply and demand and wages.

In the manufacturing industry, which is the largest user of automation today, the skills gap is driving up what are already strong wages and benefits, well over the US average. In 2015, manufacturing workers earned $81,289 including pay and benefits compared to $63,830 for the average worker in all nonfarm industries. And 92% of manufacturing workers were eligible for health insurance benefits. Despite that, manufacturing executives reported an average of 94 days to recruit engineering and research employees and 70 days to recruit skilled production workers.

Bridging the skills gap with innovative training.

Automation age jobs range from well-paying, entry-level and blue-collar positions through engineers and scientists. Stable automation-age manufacturing jobs can start at $20 per hour with just a high school diploma, a few months of automation training, and professional certification. Employers, vocational schools, and universities are offering innovative training approaches that give workers alternatives to the traditional (and expensive) high-school-to-college-to-job route. And employers such as GM are revitalizing apprenticeships, recognizing the significant advantage those programs offer.

Summary

Consider this equation

Automation –> Increased Productivity –> Improved Competitive Position –> Company Growth –> More Jobs

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