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Its not just automation. There have been many more applications of optimization to reducing operating margins. At my company, there was, for example, a project
by 2sk21 10y ago
Its not just automation. There have been many more applications of optimization to reducing operating margins. At my company, there was, for example, a project aimed at identifying the optimal service intervals for heavy mining equipment. As a result of this work, it was possible to substantially reduce the amount of preventative maintenance that was being done on the machinery. It was found that not all of the preventive maintenance was cost effective.
- Delphiza 10y agoThis is a missing part of long stories about AI and automation. I too work in servicing of industrial equipment that is now being connected. The algorithms can be simple - after n running hours a component needs servicing. No fancy AI or automation, no over-hyped 'predictive maintenance' machine learning, just a 'connected machine'. As a result, the number of service engineers can be reduced significantly because they no longer over-service. This is not a robot taking someone's job, but a 10% efficiency gain in servicing equipment is a lot of people. It's across a skills range too - we have customers that range from minimum wage floor cleaners to PhD-level scientific equipment engineers.