Category Archives: Automation

Despite concerns that the robots are coming for our jobs, automation is responsible for only a fourth as many jobs lost astrade with China since the turn of the century, according to a report released Wednesday.

The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute analyzed recent research by economists Daron Acemoglu, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Pascual Restrepo, of Boston University, and concluded that automation is a sideshow compared to the bigger causes of job loss and wage stagnation.

Studies that attempt to estimate the number of jobs that will be potentially lost to automation in the future never seem to take into account automations positive effects on employment.

Studies that attempt to estimate the number of jobs that will be potentially lost to automation in the future never seem to take into account automations positive effects on employment, study co-author Josh Bivens said in a prepared statement. The invention of the automobile eliminated jobs in the horse-drawn carriage industry, but it led to new jobs in the repair and sales of autos, as well as the construction of highways. There is no evidence that future automation will somehow be different.

The report indicates that the simulated effects of automation project an annual job loss total of about 40,000. Job loss from the China trade shock is about four times as high. The robot displacement Acemoglu and Restrepo found amount to a decline of .34 percentage points in the share of the work-age population with jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Alan Tonelson, an independent economic policy analyst and longtime trade critic, said the reports job-loss estimates as a result of China trade are plausible.

Productivity Slowing

Source: Economic Policy Institute

Thats certainly on the low end, he said.

Tonelson, who writes about the economy at the RealityChek blog, told LifeZette that other economic data support the conclusion of the Economic Policy Institute that productivity gains are slowing.

It certainly does track with the idea that capital spending has been relatively weak, he said.

The report argues that there is no evidence that automation in the past 10 to 15 years has increased overall joblessness. The report points to data showing that automation increased rapidly in the late 1990s at the same time that America experienced the fastest across-the-board wage growth in a generation. But indicators of automation fell during two periods of stagnant or declining wage growth from 1973 to 1995 and from 2002 to today.

In the last decade, according to the report, the pace of automation has slowed along with declining rates of productivity and investment in software and information equipment.

Those statistics, the authors argue, do not suggest America is on the cusp of a robot takeover.

Rather than wringing our hands over possible problems that are more than a decade away, policymakers need to focus on addressing the decades-long crisis of wage stagnation by creating good jobs and supporting wage growth, co-author Lawrence Mishel said in a statement.

Tonelson said it is a reasonable conclusion that automation in manufacturing improves efficiency, which leads to job growth in other sectors.

"It could be creating jobs in manufacturing itself," he said.

But Tonelson said he thinks the Economic Policy Institute is too quick to dismiss concerns about the potential for robots and artificial intelligence to displace millions of workers in the future.

"It is possible there's this watershed that we're rapidly approaching," he said.

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Study: China Trade, Not Automation, Destroying US Jobs - LifeZette

In March, Rocky Mountain Institute and our partners convened more than 60 stakeholders from across the electricity industry for two days in Chicago to explore the potential for a new and promising technology:automated emissions reduction,or AER.

At scale, this technology, deployed in residential loads such as air conditioners and water heaters across the United States, could reduce carbon emissions each year by the equivalent of taking 2 million to 3 million cars off the road. This does not count the potential from other flexible loads in commercial and industrial settings; at least 30 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption has some inherent flexibility that could be leveraged for carbon reduction using AER.

Building off new research that canidentify marginal grid emissions signalsfrom a variety of public data sources, the nonprofitWattTimepioneered AER in the past two years as a customer-facing service. AER reduces pollution by seamlessly shifting the timing of end-use loads to move consumption into the cleanest possible intervals, allowing customers to significantly reduce the environmental impact of their energy use.

At least 30 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption has some inherent flexibility that could be leveraged for carbon reduction using AER.

WattTimespilot project in Chicago, executed in partnership with RMI and several other organizations, produced compelling evidence that customer demand for this kind of technology may be significant. We convened the Chicago workshop in order to test the value proposition of AER for different customer segments and identify a path to scale the technology. In particular, participants identified the sources of value that AER potentially could provide, as well as barriers that must be overcome for stakeholders to successfully unlock that value.

By the end of the event, participants identified 11 priority projects that could help solidify the value proposition and test the key use cases for AER going forward. The project team, led by WattTime, will be working with participants and other stakeholders to drive these initiatives to a successful conclusion and scale the broader market for AER.

Charrette participants worked in breakout groups to understand the value propositions and barriers for four distinct customer groups.

Each group also discussed several barriers to realizing these values. Among them were: the relative complexity of AER compared with other emissions-reduction measures that may make it difficult to communicate its benefits to stakeholders; ongoing questions around who is in the best position to pay for any infrastructure or product changes required to enable AER; and proving the case that customers will adopt AER-enabled devices and use them to reduce emissions.

After identifying the value propositions and possible barriers, participants designed 11 initiatives to test the hypotheses around customer value, and address the particular barriers for each customer segment. Using this industry input, the project team is prioritizing five near-term initiatives, working with participants and others, to drive the market forward.

RMIs project partners at WattTime are leading these ongoing initiatives with interested charrette participants, but there is room for these efforts to grow. If your organization is interested in learning more about this work or joining our efforts to drive this market to scale, please contact us via email:[emailprotected].

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How automation could simplify emissions reductions - GreenBiz

Marketing automation is helping bookkeeping firm Sum of All Numbers create a sales management pipeline, to keep track of sales and onboarding.

The Fremont, CA-based firm, founded in 2006, works with $500,000 to $5 million companies. The virtual company (everyone is in a home office) has about 400 clients, 75% of who are based in California.

It has been working with InfusionSoft since 2010 to implement marketing automation. The system helps Sum keep track of leads and manage long-term nurturing campaigns, said Holly DeVito, CEO and founder. The majority of the companys leads come from referrals from certified public accountants (CPAS). While Facebook advertising has been successful, it hasnt done a lot of lead gen and outbound marketing.

We dont provide tax services, so CPAs are happy to refer us, she said.

At the start of the process, a sales person will do a discovery call with a prospect to see if they are a fit. Then, an evaluation will be conducted of their business to begin the relationship and establish a level of trust.

The personal touch is what we use marketing automation for the most in long term nurturing campaigns, she said, noting a number of triggered emails go out to gauge interest levels and mark milestones, such as birthdays.

Sum of All Numbers also sends content-rich monthly newsletters with content on financial topics such as tax tips and when payments are due. Personalization is heavily used to help establish the personal connection.

ROI is gauged by the number of leads from marketing and advertising efforts.

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Marketing Automation Adds Up for Bookkeeping Firm - Chief Marketer

Chef Software added a handful of new automation features to various enterprise-focused platforms targeting the transition to cloud and use of containers. Most of the updates integrate functions across the companys various platforms.

The companys continuous automation platform (Chef Automate) directly integrateswith its compliance automation framework (InSpec). The move is said to provide a more consistent workflow for validating security requirements and compliance controls.

Chefs Automate platform also integrates with the companys application supervisor technology (Habitat). The integration extends Habitats functions for deploying and managing applications from legacy platforms to container-based, cloud-native microservices.

Continuous automationenables operations to deliver services in conjunction with developers, as a team, with Chef becoming the common language for which the teams can communicate removing roadblocks across platforms and applications, explained Edwin Yuen, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, in a blog post. This improves the outcomes of the developers work, with increased efficiency, speed, and reduced risk.

The Automate platform late last year gained a managed service option running through Amazon Web Services (AWS). The move provides AWS customers with access to the Chef service in a cloud or on-premise environment.

The Habitat platform gained the use of scaffolding to support faster packaging of apps built-in with new languages and frameworks. The packaged apps can then be exported to different runtimes like Docker and ACI for use on containers such as Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Mesosphere.

Habitat also gained 20 core build plans designed to allow enterprises a quicker path to packaging applications. In addition, Habitat now will automatically rebuild packages accepted and curated as core as their dependencies are updated.

Chef launched Habitat last year, with a focus on providing a new way for developers to create apps without having to decide early on a specific infrastructure.

The compliance-focused InSpec framework added incubation projects tied to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and VMware vSphere. The projects migrate compliance code to the cloud, and provide resources to test and configure the cloud platforms.

A recent enterprise cloud survey conducted by RightScale found compliance to be the second biggest challenge for companies deemed cloud focused in their use of cloud platforms.

The same survey found Chef running a close second to Docker in terms of DevOps platforms used by enterprises. However, the data also revealed that Docker had eaten into Chef usage since the same survey was conducted last year.

Yuen explained others in the space, including Red Hats Ansible product and Puppet, have their advantages and disadvantages depending on how they are being used beyond their core platforms.

There are certainly competitors in the automation arena but Chef is extremely well positioned with their technology, products, and partners, Yuen noted. I certainlysee Chef leading the way by becoming not just an automation provider used by enterprises but by becoming the enterprise wide automation platform of choice.

Dan Meyer is a Senior Editor at SDxCentral, with a focus on containers, lifecycle service orchestration, cloud automation and DevOps. Dan has been covering the telecommunications space for more than 17 years. Prior to SDxCentral, Dan was Editor-In-Chief at RCR Wireless News.

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Chef Updates Automation Platform for Cloud and Containers - SDxCentral

In a country that celebrates startups, S Thirumalai Shelvan cannot but rue the cruel irony of being pushed down the path of striking out on his own after a software exporter judged him to be below par before ousting him. After multiple attempts at finding a job post layoff, he decided the bread and butter would come only if he parlayed his experience into a new business of writing and selling software to small enterprises that needed to go digital.

Every morning, he would visit the offices of potential clients in Chennai to sell his billing and accounting software, web development codes, and a ready-to-deploy inventory monitoring package. His companys revenue is not what he earned as a salaried employee. But life ploughs on.

The evenings are more purposeful: gathering evidence of his good work, consulting with lawyers and activists, and multiple trips to the Madras High Court. His two-year case insisting that he was fired illegally and had legal remedy under the Industrial Disputes Act is ambling on through affidavits and counter-affidavits in laws due course.

It has not been a smooth ride. I have asked myself why do I need to take up a legal struggle? For some strange reason I have kept it up, said Shelvan. Not just Shelvan. A small but growing number of aggrieved IT employees is turning to the courts seeking redress of grievances including indiscriminate layoffs and long work hours. Often, they are supported by external representative groups because they and their colleagues havent been able to muster courage or strength to form unions within their companies.

Setting a landmark precedent for those wanting to fight it out, in January 2015, Sasirekha Thangavel Natarajan had her termination revoked by Tata Consultancy Services after she petitioned the Madras High Court. Natarajans successful challenge potentially set the stage for Tamil Nadu to become a hotbed for IT employees seeking to unionize. Unionists and members of the IT industry say that the sheer strength in numbers well over 300,000 IT employees work out of Chennai alone lend the state a critical mass for mobilization.

For over three years now, technologists are taking the help of pressure groups such as the Forum For IT Employees (FITE) to demand answers for involuntary exits of employees from IT firms. Many of them waging legal battles are still unemployed. Some of the retrenched have dropped their litigation halfway after finding employment in other firms.

WHEN IT FIRMS TURNED FACTORIES Indias IT sector and unions or pressure groups have rarely appeared on the same page. Unionisation of the workforce is usually associated with the manufacturing industry, where labour unions have helped factory workers fight for higher wages, job security, and better working conditions.

On the contrary, IT employees for decades have enjoyed double-digit pay hikes, comfortable work conditions, established redressal mechanisms and lavish perks. Given this, one might wonder if there was a transition afoot to seek the security of a union to guard against the layoff bogeyman.

Experts believe this was bound to happen. Workers reach out to unions when they feel insecure about their employment, when they feel under-compensated for their work, and when they feel working conditions need improvement. In the export IT industry only the first of these conditions is starting to occur, said Peter Bendor-Samuel, chief executive at consulting firm Everest Group.

During the heyday of the Indian IT outsourcing boom in the post-liberalisation era, the workforce constituted the creamof-the-crop techies who did bespoke application development high-skilled and customised work for clients. In the years following 2005, companies started winning large outsourcing deals resulting in explosive growth in the subsequent years. The large deals meant a shift to managed services, which are repetitive in nature.

This is when the IT requirement changed from a creative, thought-process oriented, cream-of-the-crop sort of employment to a factory-type employment post-2005, said Siddarth Pai, a technology strategy expert. The move from differentiated work to a repetitive factory-oriented work was the perfect setting for employees to think about the potential of unionisation. When you have an undifferentiated (factory like) workforce, this leads to unionisation much more easily.

Since 2008, the Indian IT Industry has seen multiple attempts at unionisation.

BIRTHED IN REVOLUTION FITE traces its origins to the Sri Lankan strife. When the civil war ended, Young Tamils Movement, of which FITE is an off-shoot, shifted attention to the need for proper rehabilitation of displaced ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka. Afterward, members of the forum asked for action on issues closer home: a police firing on Dalit protesters in a Tamil Nadu village; the apprehension of fishermen from Rameshwaram by the Sri Lankan Navy.

As they progressed from one social crisis to another, the group staged a demonstration for safer working conditions for women after the brutal murder of a female employee along Chennais IT corridor. In late 2014, FITE leveraged the huge presence of technology workers in its membership to catapult into public conscious the issue of retrenchments by IT companies.

Nearly two years after, another spate of involuntary exits by IT employees emerged, and FITE and another grouping, the National Democratic Labour Front-IT, acted as facilitators for the employees. In February 2015, NDLF-IT filed a public interest litigation seeking directions for the TN government to ascertain if labour protection laws applied to the IT sector. Well over a year and a notice to the government threatening a contempt petition, the state responded that the industry had all along been under the purview of the labour laws.

The Trade Union Act, 1926 guarantees the right to form unions in any industry.

The provisions in the Industrial Dispute Act, 1947 provides immunity for factory workers or workmen. Whether or not IT employees can be classified as workmen is still being contested and the law is somewhat ambiguous.

IT employees are knowledge workers, who are deemed as Executive class, said V Nagaraj, Professor of Law at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Only workmen have some protection under the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947. IT employees, are not workmen and come under contractual relations.

WHAT PRICE UNIONS? Experts are divided on the longevity of the unions and any potential negative impact they might have on the IT sector but they agree that the attempts at unionisation can no longer be ignored. India is the worlds largest sourcing destination for the information technology (IT) industry, accounting for about 67% of the $124 billion-$130 billion export market.

In the unlikely event that widespread unionisation did occur in a firm, it would be a significant setback for the firm.

Clients would likely react negatively and quickly move their work to non-unionized firms, Everest Groups Bendor-Samuel said. Unionised workforces are typically significantly less productive than their nonunionized competitors and unionisation is also viewed as a constraint to implementing automation or other new technologies.

IT industry veterans are positive the unions are temporary. IT is an industry where the employees are paid well and even today the attrition is high. I dont think unionisation as a concept would work. There will be noises whenever there is a job loss or a downturn, but it cannot sustain, said V Balakrishnan, former chief financial officer at Infosys.

Historically, unions have created a difficult work culture and companies tend to avoid countries they consider to be having adverse labour policies. At the start of the labour arbitrage movement, Eastern Caribbean Island, Barbados tried to position itself as a nearshore destination. Several IT firms set up offices there, but the unions, backed by the government, intervened and all the firms immediately left. Another example is France, where labour laws and unions resulted in French companies moving work out.

DUAL WORKFORCES Government intervention will be the tipping point in the on-going episode of the alleged unfair termination versus routine performance-based appraisal claims by the employees and the employers, respectively. Indian government legislation has been friendly towards the IT sector, which proved to be the backbone for employment in India for over two decades now.

This is where unions are trying to get a foothold. They are trying to augur support from employees and approaching labour commissions seeking government intervention.

The insecurity starting to creep into the industry due to job loss is nascent. Though work conditions and wages are good, the future of the IT industry and the role of employees in it are changing.

What we will be striking at in the future is carving out internal unions in these companies, said S Kumar, a member of NDLF-IT. The purpose is to have a toehold in managerial policy-making that relates to employee rights and protection, in which external unions do not have a say. NDLF-IT also plans to lobby with the Union and state governments to have a proactive role in policy-making.

Indian IT employees have come to expect long-term employment from their employers.

The prospect that relatively fewer jobs will be required after the digital automation coupled with the slowing growth of the sectors is an abrupt change in climate for employees of these firms and is causing increasing concern to some tech employees, Bendor-Samuel said.

Worker unions had not made much of an impression on IT-employees all these years, but now, with the current string of events, these seem to take significance.

If this problem really ends up going down the unionisation path companies should look at a two-pronged enterprise, said technology strategist Pai. A lot of companies in the manufacturing sector today have a portion of the workforce that is unionised and a portion that is not. This might be the first instance of a dual workforce in IT. There could be people who are a part of the union who do repetitive work, and the others who are not part of the union since they do non-monotonous, differentiated work.

The IT industry is going through a unique phase of huge uncertainty, said a veteran IT executive. Given this, its crucial that progressive companies offer clear roadmaps to their employees. For instance, if a lot of infrastructure services are moving to the cloud, can an employee working in this be offered training in security?

Thats because security will be a key component as things move to the cloud.

WARY COMRADES For close to two decades, unions have been trying to make inroads into India.

Eighteen years ago, a UK-based union tried to come in. They spent over 1 million to mobilise employees; they failed, said Raman Roy, Chairman of industry body Nasscom. There is no need for collective bargaining in our industry. We are the best paymasters in the country.

Employees, too, are not comfortable coming out openly in support of unions. There are whispered stories of a blacklist of socalled troublemakers, which would pull down their chances of landing another job. Its a vague rumour which no one can confirm or deny. But everyone is wary of the possibility, an IT employee said.

Even if more IT unions were to emerge, these will likely be extraneous bodies.

IT employees themselves havent made any effort to form an internal union, said the National Law School professor Nagaraj. In the wake of the recent events, outsiders are trying to unionise, which brings in political affiliation into IT campuses. There might be vested interests in the way these external unions act. This is neither good for the employer nor the employees.

With Inputs from Ashish Kulshreshtha

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Already grappling with automation & protectionism, IT sector has a new threat - unions - Economic Times

The Hindu

Experts say that if automation takes 2 jobs, it creates 10 more The Hindu India will not let the threat of cyberattacks, such as the recent 'Wannacry' ransomware, restrict the progress of Digital India, Union Minister for Electronics and IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad said in an interview to The Hindu. He said that the Government ...

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Experts say that if automation takes 2 jobs, it creates 10 more - The Hindu

Dorner Holding Company, the parent company of Dorner Mfg. Corp., has announced the acquisition of Sautem (http://www.sautem.com/), a leading designer and supplier of process automation equipment in Mexico.

Dorner Mfg. Corp. (http://www.dornerconveyors.com) is an industry leader in the design, application, manufacturing and integration of precision industrial and sanitary conveyor systems. The addition of Sautem is the latest step in Dorner Holding Companys international expansion. In the past two years Dorner has acquired Geppert-Band, a German-based manufacturer of belt and modular belt conveyors; FlexMove, a Malaysia-based manufacturer of flexible chain conveyors; and opened an office in Ontario, Canada. The acquisition of Sautem better positions Dorner to continue growing its presence in Mexico and Latin America.

We continue to see new opportunities in Mexico and Latin America. The addition of Sautem, a company with more than 15 years of experience in process automation, will allow us to better support this growing market, said Terry Schadeberg, president and CEO, Dorner Mfg. Corp. On behalf of everyone at Dorner Holding Company, Id like to welcome the Sautem employees to the Dorner family.

Located in Jalisco Mexico, Sautem solutions are used extensively in packaging, automation, food processing, and other industries.

>>For more information, click here

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Dorner Expands its International Reach with Acquisition of Mexico-Based Sautem - Automation World

Forbes

Millennials And Automation: A Departmental Examination Forbes Automation is the way of the future; not just in the American workplace, but globally. Currently, about 60 percent of businesses could have one-third or more of their business processes fully automated by modern technologies. As those technologies ...

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Millennials And Automation: A Departmental Examination - Forbes

NEW YORK Retailers are no strangers to embracing technology; however, a new report estimates that between 6 and 7.5 million retail jobs risk being eliminated because of automation in the industry.

Retail cashiers are at highest risk for automation technologies, and women hold 73 percent of these positions.

That's according to a new study, Retail Automation: Stranded Workers? Opportunities and Risks for Labor and Automation, conducted by Cornerstone Capital Group and commissioned by the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute (IRRCi).

The report identifies the structural factors catalyzing change in the retail industry which employs roughly 16 million U.S. workers and is authored by Sebastian Vanderzeil and Michael Shavel of Cornerstone.

The retail industry represents 10 percent of the nation's working population and generates 6 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). A lack of disclosure on key labor metrics by retailers puts investors in the dark on how these companies are responding and what the fate of their workers could be, according to Cornerstone.

"This in-depth examination of retail automation gives investors insights as they consider investment risks and opportunities," said Jon Lukomnik, IRRCi executive director. "While the findings are important to investors, they should sound the alarm for economists and political leaders.

"The shrinking of retail jobs in many ways threatens to mirror the decline in manufacturing in the U.S. Moreover, in this case, workers at risk are already disproportionately working poor, so any disruption may cause strains in the social safety net and stresses on local tax revenues," Lukomnik added.

Among the report's findings:

"The retail landscape is changing rapidly and investors need to understand the social and governance issues impacting valuations for public companies in this sector," said Erika Karp, Cornerstone founder and CEO. "Retailers are facing a perfect storm: they need to balance demand for wage increases with the negative optics of future job losses.

"The winners in retail will be companies that provide recruitment, retention and training for workers and innovate with forward-thinking future store strategies," Karp said.

The report details the technologies retailers are deploying, looks at the drivers of automation, and provides a framework to analyze the automation strategies of 30 large retail companies.

In some cases, technology is complementing labor by freeing workers from mundane tasks and facilitating a more personalized customer experience. In others, technology has the potential to automate a significant part of the sales process and render a range of jobs redundant, according to Cornerstone.

Taken together, store closures and technology have the potential to dramatically alter the employment landscape in America.

To access the report, click here.

Based in New York, IRRCi is a nonprofit research organization that funds academic and practitioner research enabling investors, policymakers, and other stakeholders to make data-driven decisions

New York-based Cornerstone is an SEC-registered Investment advisor focused on helping its client base of individuals, family offices, foundations and endowments to align their investments with their mission, values or interests while seeking to achieve competitive investment returns. Cornerstone works with asset owners, corporations and financial institutions to promote new research in the field of environmental, social and governance analysis.

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Retail Automation Threatens 6M-Plus Jobs - CSNews Online

The low price of crude may have slowed the advance of drilling automation technology, but it clearly has not stopped it. Uptake is rising, chiefly in the US onshore market, where contractors including Nabors and Precision Drilling have recently rolled out their first batch of closed-loop automated rigs that take key pieces of the well construction process out of human hands.

Service giant Schlumberger is doing the same after it acquired a number of drilling technology firms in recent years, including one that developed rig control systems for the competitiona factor that has been seen as incentivizing other drilling contractors to accelerate their automated ambitions.

The introduction of these new rig systems comes at an opportune time for contractors because US demand for high-performance rigs is rising at its fastest clip since the downturn began. The swelling rig count is being met with a shortage of qualified hands, another factor adding momentum to the adoption of rig automation.

I do not think that the traditional means of training lots and lots of people will fly anymore because you get a variable output, and it costs a lot of money, said John de Wardt of the current drilling environment. If you can buy an automated drilling system, then you save a lot of money on people and trainingand you know it will do what you want to do.

De Wardt, a Colorado-based oil and gas consultant, is the program manager for the Drilling Systems Automation (DSA) roadmap initiative that was created to guide the industrys technology development strategy through 2025. Launched in 2013 as an all-volunteer initiative, the DSA has since become a 10-member joint industry project formed by a different group of companies than those mentioned above, including Shell, Saudi Aramco, National Oilwell Varco (NOV), and Halliburton.

As the various players in the automation arena ramp up their development work and early-commercialization efforts, the DSA roadmap shows that the industry is still a ways off from the final destination of fully autonomous rigsthe nuanced view would describe todays newest advanced drilling assets as semi-autonomous.

To get to greater autonomy, the industry must decide which way to go on what de Wardt refers to as the forks in the road. These are the key technological decisions that he said will determine what form drilling automation takes going forward.

A few of the most important include whether companies should invest in interoperable systems or proprietary ones; open software or black-box programing; low-rate mud-pulse data communications or high-speed hardwired pipe; keep retrofitting or begin designing purpose-built automated rigs.

From the view of the roadmap, one of the shortest routes to full-automation can be taken if equipment manufacturers embrace interoperability so their various hardware and software products can work and communicate together. This would encourage uptake by giving end-users more flexibility in the integration of an automated solution.

This is also easier said than done because, Our industry has fostered 100% competitiveness, de Wardt said in explaining that the challenge of implementing interoperability is not technical, it is managerial.

Drawing on the experience of the industrial automation sector, he told how a similar tug-of-war played out between companies who sought to secure market share with proprietary systems and those that assumed an agnostic approach to data communication.

In the end, the open system people won, de Wardt said. Companies that placed the right bet, such as Fortune 500-listed Emerson Electric, became leaders in the sector while proprietary-system makers faded out of the picture. This question over interoperability also reshaped the auto-industry whose biggest firms decided to agree on key standards and compete on their ability to innovate.

As an industry, were still trying to get our heads around what is the collaboration piece, and what is the competition piece, said de Wardt. If we get that right, then we will progress far faster than we are today.

In a similar vein, automation developers must decide if their software will be open for customers to validate and integrate with add-on programing. The alternative is black box software that does not show its math. To create some middle ground on this issue, the DSA roadmaps recommendation is to create a non-competing certification body that can sign off on such software products.

What we are saying is that if people have black boxes that give outputs that can improve the performance of the human on the rig or goes into the rigs control system, a validation methodology would allow them to tell customers that an authority has confirmed its reliability, said de Wardt. It will need some description around what its limitations are, and overviews of how it does it, without giving away proprietary information, and today, that is not done.

Another bellwether to watch in the automation race is what telemetry and data communication systems will win out. In terms of data rates, nothing compares to the 50,000 bps speed of NOVs wired drillpipe. The downside of the technology is that it has been cost prohibitive for many. The company is working to bring the price down by stepping up its manufacturing, while others are trying to push the limits of low-bandwidth mud-pulse, electro-magnetic and acoustic telemetry systems that transmit data at 40-80 bps.

De Wardt said developers are quietly working on clever ways to improve mud-pulse telemetry systems to a point where they can be used to expand downhole automation capabilities, as opposed to surface-controlled automation via wired pipe.

The question is, which of these systems will predominate and what is their price point. That will determine how the automation map looks, in the years to come, said de Wardt.

As the timeline expands further out, the drilling sector will be contemplating whether to redesign the drilling rig from the bottom up as a natively automated systemeffectively, to make it a drilling robot.

While the DSA does not see retrofitting existing rigs as the most valuable option, it is the most attractive for now. Rig demand in the US is far from recovering to 2014 levels, and may never do so, but de Wardt reminded that the industry has a long tradition of avoiding the obsoleting of such capital intensive assets.

What these companies and their customers are weighing is the known value of the current top-tier rig inventory against the potential value of a purpose-built automated fleet.

In the US drilling market, with its very high performance, that gap is small, de Wardt said, highlighting the point that in recent years human drillers have realized major gains in efficiencies, significantly raising the bar on what the next level of automated rigs must offer to justify investment.

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These Are the Forks in the Road to Drilling Automation - Journal of Petroleum Technology