Category Archives: Automation

The "Global Intelligent Building Automation Technologies Market (2019-2025)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Global Intelligent Building Automation Technologies Market size is expected to reach $103.7 billion by 2025, rising at a market growth of 7.3% CAGR during the forecast period.

Intelligent building uses advanced technologies and interconnected systems that can assist the automation of building management systems. This further facilitates the efficient operation of a building and supports space reconfiguration in response to changing usage. Because of increased demand for connectivity, improved automation of building management, expanding market for building automation and control system, as well as the need for energy-efficient solution to save energy and reduce carbon emissions around the world, the intelligent building market share has multiplied.

In addition, continuous extensive population growth, specifically among developing countries, generates the need for smart buildings that offer optimum use of space in a core comforting and sustainable way. Due to this, many governments are making substantial investments in smart cities and smart building development in order to promote sustainable development practices to address the challenges of urbanization growth.

Increasing the need for integrated security and security systems and decreasing operating costs due to the uptake of BEMS (Building Energy Management Systems) contributes to the adoption or retrofitting into a smart building that is expected to drive demand for the global intelligent building market. In addition, increasing energy-efficient projects and growing digitization across commercial and industrial buildings are expected to provide the market with long term growth possibilities.

Based on Solution type, the market is segmented into Hardware, Software and Services. Intelligent building automation technologies are an integrated software and hardware network that manages and monitors the environment of building facilities. Various hardware devices used include actuators, controllers, and sensors. Collectively, these devices guarantee that HVAC systems are properly managed by automated control and that the building climate stays within an acceptable range.

Based on Product, the market is segmented into Facility Management, Security Systems, Building Energy Management Systems and Life Safety Systems. Based on the Application, the market is segmented into Commercial, Residential and Industrial.

The major strategies followed by the market participants are Product launches and Partnerships & Collaborations. Based on the Analysis presented in the Cardinal matrix, ABB Group, Eaton Corporation PLC, United Technologies Corporation, Honeywell International, Inc., and Siemens AG are some of the forerunners in the Intelligent Building Automation Technologies (IBAT) Market. The market research report covers the analysis of key stake holders of the market.

Recent strategies deployed in Intelligent Building Automation Technologies (IBAT) Market

Collaborations, Partnerships, and Agreements:

Acquisition and Mergers:

Product Launches:

Expansions:

Companies Mentioned

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/qhixbn

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191213005261/en/

Contacts

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Global Intelligent Building Automation Technologies Market Report 2019-2025: Market Size is Expected to Exceed $100 Billion - ResearchAndMarkets.com -...

Online commerce giant eBay has relaunched its dedicated mobile app for car sellers and buyers, more than four years after killing the app. The eBay Motors app has been in beta for a few months, and version 1.0 is now live for Android and iOS.

The new incarnation sports a number of notable automated features to help people sell their vehicles, including an image-categorization tool that groups photos by type, which was built using Googles AutoML Vision Edge tool for Firebase. The app has also been rebuilt from the ground up using Flutter, Googles open source platform for developing cross-platform apps based on the same codebase.

For background, eBay first launched a dedicated mobile app for cars back in 2011, but ended up pulling the app alongside three other standalone apps in 2015 as it consolidated its services under the main eBay platform. Fast forward to 2019, and eBay Motors has risen from the dead with a renewed focus on helping individuals compete with professional dealers with as little friction as possible.

Its worth noting that eBay is no stranger to computer vision the main eBay app has offered visual search tools for a few years. The eBay Motors app itself offered a visual search tool as far back as 2012, allowing users to snap a photo of a car in the real world to find similar vehicles on eBay.

But with advances in technology and edge computing, the 2019 incarnation of the app is a different beast, with all the image processing now taking place on the phones themselves. This shows how far weve come in terms of the power of off-the-shelf solutions such as AutoML Vision Edge. According to eBay, its algorithm was created by a single engineer in a matter of days, using just a few hundred photos from existing eBay listings to train the model.

The ease-of-development speaks to the maturity of AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning), which have moved beyond the province of data scientists to off-the-shelf tools which are available to software engineers, eBay wrote in a blog post.

Being able to instantly categorize photos might seem like a minor factor for sellers, but images are particularly important for anyone looking to sell a vehicle. The average number of photos someone uses to sell a car on eBay is 15 to 20, though you can upload as many as 100. Thats a lot of photos to sift through for casual individual sellers and if theyre competing against professional dealers, this puts them at a disadvantage. Moreover, eBay itself is an attractive option for auto enthusiasts looking to get into the nuts and bolts of a car, so being able to automatically group pictures by type, allowing enthusiasts to easily see the engine, will help it compete with other similar sites.

With the new eBay Motors app, users can snap photos via their phones camera and upload them, and the app will group them by exterior, interior, and engine / drivetrain. This covers most of the likely areas that different buyers will be interested in some people care more about the look of a car, and some are more concerned with what its like inside. And the car geeks probably want to have a peek under the hood.

Above: eBay Motors: Photos grouped by interior, exterior, and engine.

Additionally, this method of grouping photos will give amateur listings a more professional look. User testing of the eBay Motors app showed that photos which are well-organized into three buckets make buyers feel the listing is more trustworthy, eBay wrote.

As an aside here, while eBay already allowed users to embed videos directly from sites such as YouTube, the new eBay Motors app will now support video uploads a first for any eBay app.

Elsewhere in the automation realm, the eBay Motors app also now lets users snap a photo of their license plate to automatically pull in all the relevant details, including make, model, and year.

Above: eBay Motors: Scan a license plate to upload a cars information.

Looking to the future, eBay said that next year it will introduce a new feature that uses AI to help sellers generate a description of the vehicle. The app will ask the seller to provide a few pieces of information about the car, such as the condition and any modifications that have been made, and then the eBay Motors app will use a natural language generation model to create a description. This fits into a trend weve seen elsewhere, where publishers like the Associated Press (AP) produce journalistic content, such as sports and finance reporting, written by algorithms based on data points.

While eBay Motors is a niche app focused squarely at one market, its worth noting that the U.S. used-car industry shifts more than double the number of vehicles each year compared to new ones. In other words, eBay Motors taps a gargantuan market, and that is why eBay has elected to relaunch a dedicated mobile app for the segment.

With these various automation features combined, eBay said that sellers should be able to list their vehicles directly from their phone in less than 5 minutes. Ultimately, the less friction there is, the better both for the seller and for eBay.

With the new launch, were serving an elevated experience that is unrivaled in the market for buyers and sellers alike, and is a game changer in the way users buy and sell cars, noted eBay Vehicles general manager Ron Jaiven.

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eBay relaunches Motors app with AI and automation at its core - VentureBeat

LAS VEGAS -- Successful IT leaders know how to navigate change. In 2020 and beyond, that skill will almost certainly be put to the test.

To remain relevant and competitive in the years to come, enterprises need to embrace top IT trends around infrastructure automation, hybrid management tools and DevOps -- despite the growing pains they'll inevitably face along the way. How to do just that was the subject of discussions at Gartner's IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference here this month.

In search of greater agility, and faced with demands to do more with less, enterprises should increasingly lean on automation, from a business process standpoint and in IT infrastructure.

"Automation is to modern infrastructure what blood is to the body," said Dennis Smith, research vice president at Gartner, at the event. You simply can't run one without the other, particularly as IT teams manage complex and heterogenous infrastructure setups.

At this point, the benefits of IT automation are well-established: a reduced risk of human error and an IT staff that has the time to work on more strategic, higher-level, involved tasks. But making the shift from manual to automated IT management practices in configuration management, capacity planning and other critical tasks can be tricky. And it won't be easy to staff up with the requisite skill sets.

That's a challenge for Keith Hoffman, manager of the data network at Sharp HealthCare, based in San Diego, Calif. "My team is made up of legacy network engineers, not programmers," Hoffman said. "But we've talked about [the need for automation], and we see the writing on the wall."

Hoffman's team currently has some ad hoc instances of IT infrastructure automation via scripts, but the goal is to scale those efforts, particularly for automated configuration management. They've taken training courses on select automation and orchestration tools and turned to Sharp HealthCare's internal DevOps team to learn and apply automation best practices.

To help close skill gaps, and to encourage broader IT automation efforts, enterprises should appoint a dedicated automation architect, said Ross Winser, senior director analyst at Gartner. The automation architect should help IT navigate the ways it can achieve infrastructure automation -- infrastructure as code, site reliability engineering, a move away from traditional scripts in favor of AIOps practices -- as well as the vast ecosystem of tools and vendors that support those efforts.

Hybrid environments are a perennial IT trend. As these setups become even more complex, IT ops leaders need to further refine their infrastructure management practices.

Increasingly, one enterprise IT workload can span multiple infrastructure environments: dedicated data centers, managed hosting and colocation facilities, the public cloud and edge computing locations. While these hybrid environments offer deployment flexibility, they also complicate troubleshooting, incident response and other core IT operations tasks. When a failure occurs, the complex string of system connections and dependencies makes it difficult to pinpoint a cause.

"The ability to actually get to an answer is getting harder and harder," Winser said.

Many operations teams still rely on disparate tool sets to monitor and manage resources in hybrid IT, adding to this complexity.

"I think the challenge is having a common tool set," said Kaushal Shah, director of infrastructure and information security at Socan, a performance rights organization for the music industry, based in Toronto. "What we do internally at the infrastructure layer is a lot of scripting and CLI-driven configurations, whereas in the cloud, every cloud provider has their own CLI."

Shah -- whose team runs IT infrastructure on premises and in AWS and Microsoft Azure -- said he's evaluating infrastructure-as-code tools like HashiCorp Terraform and Red Hat Ansible to "level the playing field" and provide a centralized way to manage resource configurations. Adoption poses a learning curve.

"[My team members] have a certain background and I think, for these tools, it's a different mindset: You have to describe the state of the asset as opposed to how to configure it," Shah said.

Gartner notes that many of these integrated management tool sets are still in the early days of truly centralized, end-to-end hybrid management capabilities. Infrastructure and operations teams should also use workflow visualization and dependency mapping, and create internal centers of excellence, to combat hybrid IT challenges.

For many IT shops, DevOps implementation is a significant priority. For those that have a DevOps foundation in place, the next big challenge is to ensure it can scale.

It's common practice for enterprises to get started with DevOps via pilot or incubation programs. And while there's nothing wrong with this approach, it could impede IT leaders' ability to enforce DevOps as a broad, cross-functional practice throughout the organization. A DevOps team, or even multiple DevOps teams, can sprout up and work as silos within the organization -- perpetuating the very barriers DevOps sought to break down in the first place.

Shared self-service platforms are one way to ensure a DevOps practice can scale, remain responsive and span different functional groups, Winser said. Think of them as a digital toolbox from which DevOps teams, including infrastructure and operations practitioners, can access and explore tools relevant to their role. A shared tool set promotes consistency and common best practices throughout the organization.

In addition, site reliability engineers -- who work with application developers to ensure highly reliable systems -- can promote scalability within DevOps shops. Automation also plays a role.

Socan's Shah sees DevOps as an option to transition his team out of "fire-fighting mode" and into a position where they work hand in hand with developers and business stakeholders. DevOps, in combination with streamlined hybrid IT management and infrastructure automation, could bring the team out of a technology-focused mindset and onto a platform-ops approach, where developers interact with the infrastructure via API-driven interfaces as opposed to sending IT tickets to build things.

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Put infrastructure automation at the heart of modern IT ops - TechTarget

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "Automation Testing - Market Analysis, Trends, and Forecasts" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Automation Testing market worldwide is projected to grow by US$17.6 Billion, driven by a compounded growth of 17.7%.

Functional, one of the segments analyzed and sized in this study, displays the potential to grow at over 17.9%. The shifting dynamics supporting this growth makes it critical for businesses in this space to keep abreast of the changing pulse of the market. Poised to reach over US$13.7 Billion by the year 2025, Functional will bring in healthy gains adding significant momentum to global growth.

Representing the developed world, the United States will maintain a 15.7% growth momentum. Within Europe, which continues to remain an important element in the world economy, Germany will add over US$672.8 Million to the region's size and clout in the next 5 to 6 years. Over US$563.1 Million worth of projected demand in the region will come from the rest of the European markets. In Japan, Functional will reach a market size of US$631.3 Million by the close of the analysis period. As the world's second largest economy and the new game changer in global markets, China exhibits the potential to grow at 22.6% over the next couple of years and add approximately US$4.4 Billion in terms of addressable opportunity for the picking by aspiring businesses and their astute leaders.

Presented in visually rich graphics are these and many more need-to-know quantitative data important in ensuring quality of strategy decisions, be it entry into new markets or allocation of resources within a portfolio. Several macroeconomic factors and internal market forces will shape growth and development of demand patterns in emerging countries in Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East. All research viewpoints presented are based on validated engagements from influencers in the market, whose opinions supersede all other research methodologies.

Competitors identified in this market include:

Key Topics Covered:

I. METHODOLOGY

II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. MARKET OVERVIEW

2. FOCUS ON SELECT PLAYERS

3. MARKET TRENDS & DRIVERS

4. GLOBAL MARKET PERSPECTIVE

III. MARKET ANALYSIS

GEOGRAPHIC MARKET ANALYSIS

UNITED STATES

CANADA

JAPAN

CHINA

EUROPE

FRANCE

GERMANY

ITALY

UNITED KINGDOM

SPAIN

RUSSIA

REST OF EUROPE

ASIA-PACIFIC

AUSTRALIA

INDIA

SOUTH KOREA

REST OF ASIA-PACIFIC

LATIN AMERICA

ARGENTINA

BRAZIL

MEXICO

REST OF LATIN AMERICA

MIDDLE EAST

IRAN

ISRAEL

SAUDI ARABIA

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

REST OF MIDDLE EAST

AFRICA

IV. COMPETITION

V. CURATED RESEARCH

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/34ev29

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Global Automation Testing Market Analysis, Trends, and Forecasts 2019-2025 - ResearchAndMarkets.com - Business Wire

On Dec. 13, 1968, the Montreal Gazette reported about a new automated system at the Spot Supermarket in Dorval that spared shoppers the chore of unloading their groceries onto the conveyor belt at the checkout. This photo was among those taken for the story.Montreal Gazette archives

You just cant stop progress, it seems. But not every innovation catches on.

On Dec. 13, 1968 we reported on a new, automated system that had been installed earlier that week at five check-out counters at the Spot Supermarket in Dorval.

This photo from our archives provides a cart-level view.

We described how it worked:

The customer pushes his loaded cart up snug against a frame at the end of the counter. A light on the counters edge flashes green when the cart is in the proper position. Then an arm automatically lifts the front gate of the shopping cart and a tread under the carts rubber belt bottom begins to move, making a small conveyer belt of the cart itself, we wrote.

The groceries move out of the cart and on to an inclined conveyor belt that takes them to the cashier where they are checked out. The device spares the shopper from unloading the cart herself, which means she can stand by the cashier and watch that prices rung up are correct. (Bar codes were yet to be introduced. In those days, the cashier punched each price into the cash register, so mistakes were more common.)

We reported that the new system allowed customers to spend less time at the checkout, which in turn allowed the store to use two fewer cashiers and two fewer wrappers.

This system seems to have disappeared, as has Spot Supermarket, which was a local chain.

However, many supermarkets now have self-serve checkouts, the latest attempt to save labour for the store, though not for the customer.

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History Through Our Eyes: Dec. 13, 1968, automation at the supermarket - Montreal Gazette

(Bloomberg) -- North American insurers could save up to $44 billion through 2025 using technology to automate jobs or assist employees, according to estimates from Accenture Plc.

The study released Thursday found that the broader group of financial-services firms in the region could save $87 billion to $140 billion through automation and augmentation of more than half their tasks. The cost savings could be upwards of $70 billion in banks and around $25 billion in capital markets.

There are certainly some jobs that will be automated, said Cathinka Wahlstrom, head of Accentures financial-services practice in North America. But for those employees who remain, technology can be a boon, she said. Its an opportunity as opposed to something to fear. Done right, its going to be great both in terms of productivity savings and ultimately client experience.

Banks and other financial firms are grappling with the rapid pace of technological change by overhauling operations and investing in digital offerings for clients. That means eliminating some job functions and retraining staff.

Some roles will change dramatically in years to come, Accenture said. It estimated more than 50% of tasks performed by loan officers, financial advisers, bank supervisors, loan clerks and tellers could be automated and augmented by 2025.

In capital markets, more than half of the work done by financial analysts, sales agents, brokerage clerks and statisticians could be automated or augmented in the same period. Financial-industry executives surveyed by Accenture said only a quarter of employees are ready to work with intelligent technologies.

In wholesale markets, foreign exchange has made wide use of technology while fixed income lagged, Wahlstrom said. Portfolio analysis is also becoming more automated. Even in private banking, where the wealthiest clients expect bespoke service from human advisers, digital tools are in demand.

As technology allows firms to cut costs and become more efficient, machines can also help the human workforce to focus on higher-value work such as innovation, relationship-building and customer service, the consultant said.

The labor market is really tight, so its not like theres enormous supply, Wahlstrom said. The faster and easier thing is for most companies to retrain their employees to improve their work using technology, she said.

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Automation could yield more than $40 billion in savings to insurers: Accenture - Digital Insurance

As IT groups increase for a prosperous 2020, many are watchful for creative new applications that can enable them to calibrate their companies and improve business performance. Artificial intelligence is without a doubt on everybodys radar, except all the more explicitly, robotic process automation (RPA), the subset of AI that empowers IT groups to configure software robots to capture data and perform routine tasks, is picking up traction as an alluring spot to start with outcomes centered AI implementation. RPA is getting one of the most exciting opportunities in the AI space and will keep on sparkling in 2020.

RPA will keep on being a hot market, acquiring a place in IT chiefs toolboxes to streamline business operations and utilize raw information. As indicated by Gartner, spending on RPA software is anticipated to reach $1 billion by 2020 with a CAGR of 41%. Organizations like UiPath and Blue Prism are driving the charge of scalable RPA solutions that organizations can use over their companies. In the interim, more than 70% of business pioneers said that they intend to put more in the implementation and advancement of RPA, as indicated by the Institute for Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence Survey, showing the key-value RPA has for the company.

The expression intelligent automation isnt new; it has even experienced before vogue phase. Definitions change, yet, it for the most part, alludes to the blending of process automation with increasingly cognitive AI disciplines like machine learning.

Anticipate intelligent automation as well as varieties like cognitive automation, to be well known over again in the year ahead, especially as teams increase a progressively practical comprehension of the limits of standalone, rules-based RPA. In 2020, tech pioneers will expand their underlying RPA efforts with a union of rules-based and AI-fueled automation by means of a completely integrated intelligent automation approach, empowering them to discover new value in the method for workforce capacity and operational efficiency.

As a productive collaboration between digital workers and human talent turns out to be progressively imperative, digital workforce management and administration will turn out to be progressively prevalent. With everything taken into account, intelligent automation ready to take a critical jump in 2020 and convey unmistakable outcomes to companies that make automation a key part of their digital transformation.

RPA is the entryway to other automation and AI technologies to beat difficulties presented by changing business sector demands and client necessities. Increasing demand for Business Process Automation using Artificial Intelligence and programming BOTs is foreseen to be the key growth driver for 30+ % CAGR on RPA and related services. Market will see a value in intelligent automation and will in like manner put resources into reasonable use cases.

RPA solutions dont totally take out the requirement for enterprise application integration. They encourage complicated, heritage frameworks to interact all the more smoothly. We will see an ever-increasing number of discussions around intelligent automation and above all, blend of Chatbot+RPA, AI+RPA and so forth. There will be explicit segments/business functions, which will intensely profit by these blends of technologies, for example, IT Operations, Contact Centers, Service Desk and so forth.

For a long time, prognosticators have anticipated a future with robots and intelligent elements running the world to the detriment of human laborers. Employment losses, they anticipated, would be unavoidable as AI did things quicker, more brilliant and with less HR headaches. As indicated by the HBR report that concentrated the effect of different RPA implementations demonstrated that supplanting administrative employees was neither the essential goal nor a typical result in 47% of the activities they contemplated. Truth be told, just a bunch of those RPA projects prompted decreases in headcount, and much of the time, the tasks had just been moved to outside workers. RPA bots that are intended to adjust to changing conditions and automatically deal with the correct response quickly.

RPA is most normally thought of as a productivity and effectiveness tool. Decreasing or taking out tedious manual procedures is an effectiveness unto itself. RPA and different types of automation will turn into an increasingly obvious piece of data security methodologies, not on the grounds that a multitude of bots will be battling threats on the front lines, but since they can help lessen the most universal risk of all: human mistake.

Work today is going quicker than ever and progressively from on the go, making the challenge of protecting sensitive data progressively complex and helpless against human mistake. As significant data streams all through companies, across dissimilar groups, partners, devices, mists, sellers, and customers, the old-school, human-only way to deal with data security basically cant scale to handle this information downpour, which can prompt expensive missteps.

RPA bots will help alleviate human blunder as they are consummately fit to deal with data-intensive tasks effectively and without mistake, sparing organizations significant time, decreasing security risk and liberating people to concentrate on higher-value, additionally fulfilling work.

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4 Robotic Process Automation Trends for 2020 - Analytics Insight

Pivot3, a leading provider of intelligent infrastructure solutions, announced the addition of new artificial intelligence (AI) and automation features to its Acuity software to address the data protection challenges often faced in large-scale hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) deployments.

These capabilities provide unprecedented resilience for large multi-petabyte environments, allowing customers who experience catastrophic hardware failures to quickly recover while ensuring high-availability with auto-healing, quick node rebuild and intelligent monitoring and analytics.

Customers are increasingly required to manage massive amounts of data generated by video surveillance, both for long term retention and for analysis with video analytics, said Ben Bolles, vice president of product management, Pivot3.

The sheer scale of the infrastructure needed to support these use cases presents new resilience challenges, and organizations are increasingly concerned about capturing, protecting and capitalizing on this mission-critical data.

Pivot3 is meeting this growing challenge with new automation and intelligence capabilities to provide customers with peace of mind, knowing their system is resilient, secure and always available.

At the core of Pivot3s Acuity software platform is the Pivot3 Intelligence Engine. The Intelligence Engine comprises many advanced data- and performance-management capabilities, including its market leading Business Policy Management feature. This enables customers to map business objectives to resource management through simple policies.

Pivot3 uses AI and machine learning to understand application performance, protection and security requirements and to make real-time system changes so SLAs are met. The Intelligence Engine also monitors system health and performs predictive maintenance to ensure maximum system availability. This automates time consuming systems administration and maintenance tasks to reduce operating expenses and to allow organizations to scale without adding additional IT resources.

Pivot3s Intelligence Engine now includes a suite of new auto-healing capabilities. Designed to automate human decisions and tasks, the new features replace manual recovery processes by automatically adding a node back to a cluster once it has recovered from a failure.

Pivot3 has also introduced a quick node rebuild feature to reduce repair times up to 90 percent and to eliminate the need for a time-consuming full node rebuild. This significantly lowers the risk of a second failure.

Other enhancements to the Intelligence Engine include intelligent automation, AI and analytics for proactive system health, configuration optimization and support. These additional system analytics and diagnostics provide customers with improved system health and performance and the ability to automatically share information to Pivot3s Support Cloud.

Proactive system monitoring flags events in real-time with on-alarm dispatch to Pivot3 Support and provides daily status reports. New AI and machine learning techniques analyze phone-home data and alert the customer to options if a system is not in compliance with best practices.

With the real-time system monitoring, Pivot3 Support now alerts my team to unforeseen failures and provides remediation, said Jeremiah Francis, director of information technology at Financial Advocates.

Additionally, receiving daily system health and configuration status reports allows us to ensure our system is running at peak performance; we can now more easily resolve potential points of failure and optimize for success.

Originally posted here:

Pivot3 enhances its Acuity software with new AI and automation features - Help Net Security

The world has certainly changed since Neris Bakery Products was founded by Paul Neri Sr. in 1910, but the bakerys original recipes and traditions for creating its breads, rolls and bagels have not.

About 375 people work on two shifts, six days a week, followed by maintenance and sanitation on the seventh. Dominick Neri, the companys president andchief executive officer, noted that the bakery is backed by a team of experienced supervisors and long-time senior managers, including Dominick Cicatelli, director of operations; Dagoberto Santos, sanitation manager; Andy Logue, chief engineer; Donna Schwartz, controller; Sunny Luchetta, bagel division supervisor; and Joe Topolski, quality assurance manager.

The staff here is incredible, he noted.

To provide front-end control to production in the various bakery departments over the years, Neris Bakery has installed multiple Pfening bulk ingredient handling systems from silos and sifters to scales. Overall, the operation has 1.3 million lbs of storage for white flour and 135,000 lbs for whole wheat. Bulk tanks hold 12,000 gallons of cream yeast and 6,000 gallons each for liquid sugar and canolaoil.

Overall production flows from mixing and makeup on the third floor down to ovens, packaging and warehousing on the various levels below. On most lines throughout the operation, the bakery relies on G&F spiral coolers, LeMatic slicing, Bettendorf bread slicers, Formost Fuji bagging, Kwik Lok closing and Mettler Toledo metaldetection.

In the bread department, three Peerless mixers with glycol jacketing supply two roll lines and a string line, which can produce 17-inch dough pieces that are often cut into sandwich-sized hero rolls. Neris also upgraded one of the roll lines with new Gemini makeup equipment and an intermediate proofer. The bakery is also outfitted with a Winkler 8-pocket divider that was rebuilt by Erika Record.

After makeup, the dough pieces drop onto 19-inch-wide wooden peel boards and are manually racked. Heres where certain parts of the process arent ever going to change, according to Anthony Frank Neri, plant manager of Neris Bakery. Although it requires manual loading and unloading of peel boards and pans, the bakery has stayed the course with double-rack proof boxes that the family believes provide the better flexibility of production flow and control of the entireoperation.

We stayed away from certain automation in the facility because we like to keep the Old World techniques and the hands-on feel to it, added Anthony M. Neri, general manager of Neris Bakery. Weve embraced automation to an extent, but we want to make sure our Old World process remains a priority and dont allow automation to come in and take it over. Products need to sit, settle and rise. They cant just be pushed andrushed.

After up to 1 hour in the 80-rack proof box, the products are wheeled into a 250-rack retarder set at about 40 to 45 degrees Fahrenheit from 5 to 15 hours, depending on the variety, prior to baking.

It allows us to control the process and provides the flexibility to produce what we need each day, Anthony Frank Neri noted. If you have one hiccup with an automated proofer, the whole process goesdown.

On the new bun line, two new Peerless mixers kick out 1,100-lb doughs into troughs that are lifted via chains to the divider. The dough pieces then enter a Gemini intermediate proofer for about 10 minutes before dropping onto 24-piece pans and racked. The line is outfitted with a variety of makeup components including a stamper, sheeter, curling chains and multiple-length pressure boards for buns androlls.

After proofing, the buns travel through a Burford water splitter and Smart seeding system before baking. A Gemini oven loader feeds hearth items into the oven while a push bar loads pans. After baking and depanning, the products travel to two G&F spiral coolers on a mezzanine level, then into the adjacent temperature-controlled packaging department. Meanwhile, a Stewart Systems pan stacker/unstacker helps keep productionflowing.

In packaging, a LeMatic system provides hinge or cut-through slicing before the buns travel to Formost Fuji baggers, Kwik Lok closers and Mettler Toledo metal detection systems. All packaging departments have a redundant system to handle productoverflow.

For one quick-service restaurant customer, Neris installed two specially designed Nu-Clean Conveyor systems that brand the burger chains logo onto the side of the buns. After slicing, six clusters of four buns are manually aligned and enter each system, which use 780 degrees Fahrenheit irons to apply the brand in 4 seconds.

Before we automated it, the restaurants had an employee with a small iron branding each bun right before making burgers or sandwiches out of them, Anthony M. Neri said. It just shows you how well figure out a way to make a product for a customer, ifpossible.

In the bagel department, production runs nearly nonstop on the three BakTek makeup lines. Here, the company has upgraded equipment to maintain its high-volume capacity for the bagels. The department also has a Moline sheeting line for making bagel thins.

After proofing, the bagels travel down peel boards on a lowervator to a new Heat and Control waterfall kettle for boiling prior to baking and packaging. An elevator returns the boards to the makeup department on the upperlevel.

All packaged products are staged on the lower level and shipped locally through a network of 50 independent brokers or via trailers to its larger customers distribution centers. Overall, the bakery is at about 70% capacity, which means theres ample room to expand the business evenfurther.

This article is an excerpt from the November 2019issue ofBaking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Neri's Bakery Products,click here.

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Neri's Bakery embraces automation while keeping Old World processes a priority - Baking Business

"Your lives are in danger." The warning marked the start of the session, "Rethinking the Future," by Pranjal Sharma, economic analyst and writer who focuses on technology, globalisation and media. He was referring to the fact that automation - from drones to artificial intelligence (AI) to blockchain - will impact our jobs and lives in ways we still find it difficult to imagine.

And in a country where one million new people enter the job market every month, this can be a potential disaster. And we, he said, do not have a choice, as this is already happening. "Automation is happening but India does not know how to embrace it," said Sharma, the author of 'Automated: How the Fourth Industrial Revolution is Transforming India' and 'Kranti Nation: India and The Fourth Industrial Revolution.'

FULL COVERAGE:MindRush 2019

The centre of the automation revolution, he said, are jobs that come under the four Ds - Dirty (such as cleaning rivers), Dangerous (manual scavenging), Dull (tax filing) and Difficult (surgeries). The two moving parts of automation and the fourth industrial revolution are robots and process automation.

"The key effort is there in process automation," he said, giving examples such as the postal department's mail processing centre and use of face recognition by a central government ministry to trace missing children. While all this will put jobs at stake, enterprises, too, cannot avoid updating themselves.

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For example, scanning of X-rays using AI has become common these days. This can ensure easy access to diagnostic tools and better diagnosis but put jobs at risk too. Sharma also gave the example of predictive maintenance where sensors inside machine parts tell the company when a replacement is due.

This is already very common in some industries, especially windmills, where fault in a small unit such as the battery can bring down the entire system, Sharma said. Is there a way out, for businesses as well as enterprises? Yes. But that requires a complete change of mindset. One cannot, Sharma said, live off a degree for life. Learning, unlearning and re-learning have to be a way of life.

Just like a mobile software is updated every few months, we - individuals as well as enterprises - need to keep updating themselves. "What you learnt in the past will not be relevant for the next five years," he said. "There are no short cuts. One has to change," he added.

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BT MindRush: Need regular skill updates to survive automation, says Pranjal Sharma - Business Today