Automation in Upgrading Workforce Skills

Today, information technology-led businesses are driven by ‘incremental results’ more often than not, busy in addressing ever-evolving customer expectations, growing market shares, and profitability.

- Debashis Ghosal

Today’s marketplace is far more competitive and connected. Companies are increasingly adopting a ‘pay-asyou-use’ and ‘solutions-as-a-service’ approach to achieve better business outcomes faster, thus consuming and leveraging leading-edge cloud platforms and automation.

In the scope of industrialisation, automation is going beyond mechanisation. Aimed to reduce human intervention through effective use of control systems and information technology in products and services, ‘automation’ can result in better productivity, higher output, consistent quality, lesser labour fatigue and is useful under a hazardous work environment.

Here are some examples of trends in extreme automation or usage robotics that we are already seeing across the world:

- Premier Foods has introduced 47 robots to pack Mr. Kipling cakes;

- Japan’s Nagasaki became the first hotel this year to be staffed by robots;

- Google’s Boston Dynamics was originally set up to create robots for military use;

- Remote-controlled robots designed by Toshiba were sent in to help clean up the Fukushima nuclear plant;

- The University of California in San Francisco has introduced robotic pharmacists which so far have zero errors dispensing 350,000 doses;

- In farming, Wall-Ye vine-picking robots have been introduced in France to help with cutting, pruning and harvesting;

- The mining sector is turning to robots to reach remote and treacherous areas.