Category Archives: Automation

If you can measure a jobs productivity, you can probably replace that job with a machine, so when it comes to humans in the workplace we should be measuring different things. Photograph: John Macdougall/AFP/Getty Images

A new report by the US-based National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine suggests that not only has the automation of work barely begun but that the ways in which we measure the effects of technology on employment are inadequate to the task.

The authors argue that to understand how automation is transforming our workplaces, we need better ways of tracking technological change. Put simply, they are saying that if we are what we measure that is, if policy is driven by the information we collect then we are collecting the wrong information.

Data on many of these trends are elusive, reflecting [the] changing nature of society and the economy, and gaps in [the] statistical infrastructure, the report says.

It points out, for instance, that we dont have a regular source of information about workers in part-time and other sorts of casual employment. Nor do we have good information about investment in computer technology at either the level of the company or of any given occupation.

Also lacking is long-term information about the way in which skills within particular jobs are changing, as well as data on how effective educational practices are in preparing people for work. Such information gaps undermine our ability to respond appropriately to technological change and its effects on employment.

This is a huge wake-up call for governments and businesses around the world who are proving slow to engage with the changing nature of work and who have tended to hide behind the mantra of jobs and growth, as if that will take care of everything. It is a reminder to all of us that we are long way from understanding what the future of work really looks like.

The authors call for three new indices to be developed, tools that can be used to plug holes in conventional measures such as GDP, productivity and the unemployment rate a technology progress index, an artificial intelligence progress index and an organisational change and technology diffusion index.

They set out the parameters of each in some detail and, in so doing, open up a much-needed discussion about the data used to help form public policy.

We tend to think of measures like GDP and productivity as eternal truths of economics and, indeed, they have proved their worth over time. Nonetheless, some of them are not only reasonably recent inventions, dating from around the second world war, but are designed to measure activity in an economy of mass manufacturing, a sector increasingly being displaced by the information economy as the primary source of global wealth. This means the measures themselves are also increasingly irrelevant.

As the economics professor Richard Holden wrote: The IMF model suggests Australian unemployment falling to 5.2% in 2017 and to 5.1% in 2018. But that is a pre-2008 model of how the labour market and macroeconomy interrelate. Maybe thats still the right model but I wouldnt bet on it.

As the entrepreneur and founder of Wired Magazine Kevin Kelly has said on the subject of productivity: Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity. That is why science and art are so hard to fund. But they are also the foundation of long-term growth.

To help understand the point Kelly is making, consider that a quarter of Britains top actors have been kept in work over the last decade by Harry Potter films. So although JK Rowling may be a billion-dollar industry, her value as a contributor to national wealth does not improve by subjecting her to a stopwatch and increased output to improve her productivity.

What Kelly is saying is that, if you can measure a jobs productivity, you can probably replace that job with a machine, so that when it comes to humans in the workplace we should be measuring different things. [Our] notions of jobs, of work, of the economy dont include a lot of space for experimenting, playing, creating and exploring, Kelly says, but those are the very skills that are likely to become more valuable in the workplaces of the future.

So the value that humans will increasingly bring to the workplace is to be not a robot, which will mean measuring our contribution by something other than inputs and outputs.

The National Academies report is not arguing for a wholesale replacement of traditional measures of economic activity but it is saying we need vast new supplementary data to better understand the ways in which new technologies are affecting the work that we do. Until we develop and implement these measures, it will mean that, on everything from education to welfare to employment policy, governments are flying blind.

The concerns of the reports authors are being driven by their belief that the technological disruption of employment has barely begun. They write: Opportunities for digitising and automating tasks are far from exhausted. In particular, the workforce will be increasingly affected as more and more cognitive tasks become fully or partly automatable ... and as advances in robotics yield enhanced physical dexterity, mobility and sensory perception in machines. These trends will almost surely change the demand for the workers performing these tasks and the nature of the organisations in which they work.

And so the sooner we start accurately measuring what is happening, the better.

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We need to track more than GDP to understand how automation is ... - The Guardian

If one subscribes to the idea of technological unemployment, which is the loss of employment caused by the increasing use of, and development of, technology in the workplace, then the advancing tide of technology is a frightful sight. From the relief of labour workers through machine muscle to the reduced need for human input in analysing large data, more automation is reducing the demand for human workers.

Whether one believes that technology only creates short-term unemployment with no long-standing effects (optimist) or whether one believes technologies can create a lasting decline in human employment (pessimist), it is inescapable that more and more companies are seeking to use technology to augment their business processes.

Currently, the oncoming tide of unemployment through automation is yet to make a significant splash. Mckinsey & Company, in their 2015 quarterly report Four fundamentals of workplace automation noted that in most cases of automation and computerisation, the worker was not entirely displaced, but rather experienced certain elements of their work being performed through automation. One can see such a highlight with the legal Industry, with more firms and practitioners relying on techniques and systems, such as ROSS Intelligence, to facilitate greater legal work, rather than being entirely replaced.

Furthermore, the current US unemployment rate fell to 4.5% in March 2017, from 4.7% in the previous month. This was the lowest jobless rate since May 2007, as the number of unemployed persons declined by 326,000, to 7.2 million.Furthermore, The International Bar Associations (IBA) 120 report April 2017, titled Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and Their Impact on the Workplace, found that of 1,000 manufacturing professionals, two-thirds stated they had not witnessed job losses as a result of automation, with a further 37% commenting that automation had increased job creation.

However, if there were to be a shift in the power of automation, how would employment be impacted? How would the law cope?

PricewaterhouseCoopers found, in their March 24th, 2017report that up to 30% of existing UK jobs could fall victim to automation in the next 15 years, as compared to the US (38%), Germany (35%) and Japan (21%). These impact figures ring truer in more manual and physical labour sectors such as transport and manufacturing and lower in education, health and social work. Upon this, John Hawksworth, chief economist at PwC, commented that manual and routine tasks are more susceptible to automation, while social skills are relatively less automatable. That said, no industry is entirely immune from future advances in robotics and AI.

Additionally, The IBA report pointed to the example of a German car worker costing more than 40 (34) an hour, whereas a robot was priced at between only 5 and 8 per hour.

A production robot is thus cheaper than a worker in China, the report notes. Nor does a robot become ill, have children or go on strike and [it] is not entitled to annual leave. The poignant example is the erosion of the competitive advantage of poorer, emerging economies which utilise cheaper workforces, as automated manufacturing and computer systems undercut the cost of human labour.

If these statements are held to be true, one could see a rise in technological unemployment in the coming years. Employment is more than simply a source of income, however it is a status symbol, a source of social interaction, a place to develop technical skills and abilities. Employment can provide fulfilment through to structure and security in ones life.

On the other hand, unemployment can cause mental health issues, with on average, those who are involuntarily out of work have higher levels of psychological distress than those who have work, with such illnesses becoming a barrier to re-employment.

Firstly, business restructuring, brought on by the introduction of automated work processes, will ultimately reduce the demand for a particular kind of work and could thus lead to redundancies and unemployment. This would also create new opportunities in the workforce, from the relocation of employees to retraining.

For example, an AI research programme would free up legal time, allowing junior lawyers to conduct higher-level work, and so on, thus promoting the value of work along the progression chain.

Currently, it is legally acceptable for an employer to dismiss an employee (by reason of redundancy) if the human can be replaced by a robot.Simply put, the employer need only show they have a reduced demand for employees to carry out work of a particular kind. Yet, robots lack legal personality (and thus the ability to carry liability) and thus cannot be classified as employees. Therefore, it could arise that there is both a situation of redundancy and the employer still requires that employees work to be carried out.

In this regard, it can be argued that the law should step in to either offer further protections, through the narrowing of the redundancy definition or regulating the legal status of robots. This is also relevant to issues of health and safety, particularly occupational safety hazards through working with automated machinery. This includes wearable technology such as exoskeletons, designed to enhance worker performance as these technologies could impact general health, from altering posture to straining the body.

In addition, the principle of vicarious liability and its interaction with robots creates a further legal question. This is the principle that an employer can be held liable for the wrongdoings or negligence of an employee, yet because robots cannot create primary liability nor do they hold a duty of care under the law, triggering vicarious liability would be difficult for any claimant.Thus, it is suggested that the law requires a significant review in this area, especially considering automated cars and logistics, such as unmanned drones for delivery.

This would also necessitate new skills being tutored to employees, to integrate them into the new processes. An element which the law could protect would be requiring the company to first offer retraining to displaced employees rather than simply firing them and hiring a new worker. Automation will instate the mandatory upskilling the workforce in order to efficiently and effectively utilise the systems, and thus the law could facilitate this. However, one could also argue that this is the law complicating what is essentially a business decision.

One issue that is brought to the forefront is workplace privacy. A key issue is that of behavioural analysis which can be used in the recruitment process. Employment laws in Western countries commonly protect classes of applicants, aiming to eliminate biased hiring practices. Using behavioural analysis in the recruitment process could have the unintended consequence of automating prejudice, unintentionally.

Data on behaviour and other indications of a candidates skill collected by the robotic system would be compared to similar data of successful workers already at the company or in the industry. Algorithms in these HR systems sift through resumes to find the top candidates and should the system produced biased results as against age, sex or race, then it would contravene the law.

Yet, this could easily occur if the system prioritises a certain experience or role, inadvertently discriminating against candidates if a class was more likely or less likely to exhibit those experiences. Whats more, if AI and automated systems are used to analyse candidate interviews, it could construe biological responses incorrectly.

A further consideration is the effect on working time regulations. Take for example the EU Working Time Directive, which requires EU member states to guarantee that all employees have a minimum set of rights, from the limitation of weekly working hours to an average of 48, including overtime to paid annual leave of at least four weeks per year.

The immediate consideration is in the reduction of hours that would be created by the introduction of automation, rather than being limited by the hours of work, an employee utilising automation would be limited by the amount of work available. As before, they could only work 48 hours (unless a legally-compliant waiver is signed), whereas the question is now whether there is enough work to fill those 48 hours. Consequently, this could lead to greater reliance on flexible working hours, with employers moving to contract employees in such a way as to respond to short-term fluctuations in demand for work, disrupting the traditional working week. Certainly, this can have its advantages, from enabling more time to be given to travelling workers to facilitating more familial time for those with children.

Automation also impacts collective rights and bargaining power. As aforementioned, there is currently very little protection against redundancy as a result of automation. Consequently, this also impacts collective rights as employers can, cheaply and effectively, replace swathes of workers with little ramifications, undermining social protections and job security. Whether greater security is achieved through extending individual protections or strengthening group rights, the current challenges submitted against Uber can be instructive in this regard.

Automation has raised several important questions, of both economic and political significance. Does automation lead to a rapid relocation and concentration of wealth? Is a universal minimum wage required? Should the government impose human quotas?

However, whilst these questions are certainly important, the underlying tool that can be used to facilitate the safe implementation of automation is the law. What is for certain is that laws, as they currently stand, are not adequate to address the incoming tide of automation, AI and Big Data usage.

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The Law's Role in Pushing Automation Forward - The Market Mogul

Editor's Note: The following is a guest post from Richard Bush, chief technology officer of NYIAX (New York Interactive Advertising Exchange).

Its hard not to think of airline pilots whenever someone insists that automation in the advertising industry will make people obsolete. Pilots, after all, have witnessed so much automation in the cockpit over the past few decades that many believe their role in flying the plane is superfluous.

However, at the same time, aviation experts are concerned that pilots who rely too much on machines risk losing key skills a warning that implies machines dont truly replace humans. Perhaps this is why a Pew survey found that a majority of Americans believe that within 50 years, robots and computers will do much of the work currently done by humans, but that very few of the respondents expect their own professions to experience substantial impacts. Is this disconnect a matter of denial, or do workers know something about their jobs that the conventional wisdom on automation fails to capture?

The answer hinges on the definitions we use. Automation isnt a monolith. Broadly speaking, there are two types of automation shaping the future of ad tech.

Within advertising, machine-to-machine automation describes the vast infrastructure of the LUMAscape. Inside that infrastructure, automation is increasingly deployed to ensure the real-time delivery of targeted ads. Without this automated infrastructure, programmatic buying and the real-time-bidding-driven ecosystem would, at most, be a shell of what it currently is.

While not without its flaws, this infrastructure is incredibly powerful. Automation not only achieves what humans cannot (the delivery of ads, across an immense media ecosystem, in real-time); automation also enables a virtuous circle of optimization as algorithms identify opportunities for improving performance. Still, like all infrastructure, no matter how sophisticated it becomes, the technology can never be totally self-propelled because people are essential for determining strategy and application.

People-to-process automation is machines learning from people. Here is where the fears expressed in the Pew study materialize. One common example of people-to-process automation is the commercial truck driver a profession machines will supposedly make obsolete in the next few years. But while automation will certainly transform trucking, why are we so certain humans wont have a role to play?

Drawing from our experience with commercial aviation, a human driver will be seen as an essential safeguard. But its not just about having a backup. What will an automated truck do if detained by local law enforcement, or a client refuses to pay upon delivery? Successful resolution requires judgment. The truck driver might join the Pony Express rider in the history books, but an automated truck driver could just as easily open the door for a new human role one thats more merchant and customer service representative than driver.

A similar story is playing out inside the media business. For all the high-tech advances around advertising infrastructure, media buying and selling remains a relatively low-tech affair of personal connections and Excel spreadsheets. People-to-process automation will free buyers and sellers from the minutia of tasks better left to automation. More importantly, once free from the grunt work of finding counterparties, tracking contractual details, and dozens of other tasks, buyers and sellers will be empowered in the same way that similar technologies have empowered Wall Street traders to standardize and scale trading operations. At that point, buyers and sellers will be far from obsolete, but the skill sets and job descriptions we associate with those positions will take on a more important and strategic outlook.

Trading has always been deemphasized in the media buyers job media buyer is the preferred title on the demand side, while sales covers the supply side. To the extent that machines are able to learn from media buyers and sellers, those people will be free to act as true media traders. Without the friction of executing each deal, traders will focus on a more holistic and forward-looking view that emphasizes planning and strategy, as opposed to managing and optimizing automated infrastructure.

The transformative effects of people-to-process automation wont be limited to the role of media trader or the function of a specific organization. The inefficiencies media traders experience determine the nature and scope of the market in which they participate. When traders are free to actually trade media contracts, the skill of media trading will begin to revolve around what they plan to buy, sell (or resell) tomorrow. Thats a significant departure from todays market one that will be felt most when it comes to planning. At the moment, planning remains a hollow promise without the insights that can be gleaned from a forward-looking market. As people-to-process automation frees up humans to create a forward-looking market, it also empowers them to use their full expertise in the marketplace.

Machine learning is a people-first endeavor. Looking at the technologies a firm is able to build around, people-to-process automation will inevitably reflect the unique skills of the people working in that enterprise. This wont happen overnight, but even if it happens faster than we think, humans will still find themselves pioneering new skills to address whatever new challenges emerge. The alternative isnt just the stuff of bleak science fiction; its a recipe for stagnation because automation without humans will optimize but will never innovate.

In the coming years, the enterprises that succeed wont be the ones that automate to workforce zero; they will be the firms that build their own tech, from their own data, to solve the challenges they find most pressing. This transformation will be widespread, but automation will be as diverse as the human experience, because just like every tool since the first stone hammer, the utility of the technology will only make sense in a context defined by humans. What that context will be, however, is a topic for the future, because automation is only now unleashing the next wave human innovation.

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People power: How the next automation wave will turn media buyers into traders - Marketing Dive

A new study found that a majority of technology executives believe a significant portion of jobs will be automated within the next five years.

According to results from a new study conducted by the Consumer Technology Association, a Washington, D.C., trade association representing technology companies, 7 percent of tech executives polled believe that at least some job functions would be automated within the next half-decade. Forty-four percent believe that most will be automated in that same time frame.

The executives who participated in the study were split roughly 50/50 between small and large technology companies.

Fifty-five percent of executives polled also said that they strongly agreed with the statement that they would automate jobs at their own companies to remain competitive.

Despite forecasting an uptick in the amount of jobs being automated, 70 percent executives polled also said that they agreed with the statement that they would hire more employees.

Almost half, 48 percent, of the executives said that they planned to bring on increased amounts of contract and part-time workers.

The increase of contract employees in some spaces of the economy, including on ride-hailing companies like Lyft and Uber, has prompted some to criticize the companies for avoiding giving healthcare benefits to those employees who work for the companies full time.

Other key findings in the study included that a hefty amount of executives said that they were having a difficult time finding the candidates they wanted for available jobs. Seventy-one percent said that they were having difficulties in finding properly skilled candidates for their job openings.

This might be the result of a lack of employees who have gone through skills training that employers want. Eighty-six percent of those surveyed said that they will need employees with more technical skills.

The survey polled a total of 314 tech executives.

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Study: Tech executives predict significant job automation in the next five years - The Hill

The security automation industry is still in its infancy, with most vendors just a year or two old, but there are already some promising technologies that enterprises can put to use -- if they have already laid the required ground work.

The main problem that security automation is designed to address is that there are so many attack attempts coming in, so quickly, that human beings just can't keep up.

Then there's the enormous amounts of money cybercriminals are bringing in from ransomware and other attacks that allows them to invest in new kinds of attacks, the threats posed by nation-states, and the massive staffing shortage.

It's a perfect storm.

"Even the biggest companies can't keep up," said Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

According to a survey the research firm conducted last fall, 91 percent of companies said that the time and effort required for manual processes limits their incident response effectiveness, and the same number are actively trying to increase their staffs.

And 62 percent already have automated incident response processes in place, and another 35 percent are beginning automation and orchestration projects or plan to do so in the next 12 to 18 months.

"Two years ago, nobody knew about this technology," said Oltsik. "Last year, I saw it a lot more. Now we're seeing budget line items for it, and we also see a lot of venture capitalist investment in this space as well."

He estimates the market size of the security automation and orchestration sector to be between $100 million and $200 million, with several small vendors in the $10 million to $20 million in sales range.

Security automation, could, in theory, allow companies to investigate incoming threats and respond to them immediately, without human intervention -- at least, for the most common, labor-intensive types of attacks. Security analysts would then be freed up to focus on the more complex types of attacks.

There have been some recent signs that this may be possible.

"We've had better detection accuracy," said Oltsik. "The false positive rates are lower. And we're using the cloud more, which is throwing more processing power at some of these things."

Most of the progress up until now has been in preventing attackers from entering the enterprise in the first place. Anti malware systems, next-generation firewalls, and other systems that spot threat and block them.

Most recently, threat intelligence comes with scoring systems, said Oltsik. That allows companies to add more automation for threats that have a very high likelihood of being very dangerous, and handle the questionable cases with the old manual processes.

Some of the larger companies are also deploying orchestration platforms. These allow for automated processes that involve multiple systems.

"But these types of incidence response platforms are limited right now to the elite organizations, the Fortune 500 companies," he said.

In addition, companies also write scripts to create their own automated processes from scratch, but this requires some technical expertise.

According to the most recent SANS Institute incident response survey, most processes are still very manual.

The most automated process, with 50 percent of respondents saying they had some degree of automation, was for remotely deploying custom content or signatures from security vendors.

In second place, at 49 percent, was blocking command and control to malicious IP addresses, followed by removing rogue files, at 47 percent.

Processes least likely to be automated included isolating infected machines from the network during remediation, and shutting down systems and taking them offline.

But, overall, security automation is about 10 years behind the automation of other technology processes, said Ariel Tseitlin, partner at Foster City, Calif.-based investment firm Scale Venture Partners.

"But we've seen the tremendous effect of automation in IT, and we're gong to see that in security," he said.

The prevention part of the security puzzle is the most automated, he said. Then, in the past two years, detection has seen an enormous amount of investment.

Now, there's a lot of work being done on the boundary between detection and response, where companies need to figure out which of the issues they've spotted are real problems that need to be investigated.

"Then, on the incident response side, there's an enormous amount of work that is being done manually today," he said. "That's where I think a lot of the value will come over the next couple of years."

However, all the products available today are still in their early stages, he said, and there are no clear established leaders in this space.

It makes sense to automate detection, but fully automating the remediation process is risky, said Jay Leek, managing director at ClearSky Cyber Security, a cybersecurity consulting firm.

"I would always recommend, at least today, putting a person between these two different divisions," he said. "You don't want to have false positives here."

The individual steps of the remediation process could be automated, he said, just as long as there's a human being pushing the button to get it started.

"But i don't like the idea of automating the whole end-to-end process today," he said. "It's too immature and ripe for false positives. The last thing you want to do is create some sort of business disruption."

There are vendors in the market who are already promising to automate the entire process, including automatically re-imaging end point devices and sending users off to anti-phishing training, said Nathan Wenzler, chief security strategist at AsTech Consulting.

"But at the end of the day, the reality is that anyone who's been trying to do that at scale, that hasn't really worked well," he said. "They either get so many false positives, or so many false negatives. You get annoyed users, especially if you do get a system that's re-imaged and there's nothing wrong, or at bad times."

Soon, security automation may become ever more widely available and easier to use. Major vendors have been buying up small orchestration companies and integrating their features into their platforms, and SIEM vendors have been adding automation and orchestration capabilities to their platforms.

Vendors are also starting to offer pre-built routines and run books so that companies don't have to create their remediation processes from scratch.

One positive aspect of the way automation technology is evolving is that we don't have vendor stacks or technology silos, where products from one group of companies don't play well with others, according to Joseph Blankenship, analyst at Forrester Research.

That's happened before, in other areas of IT. In security, however, enterprise environments tend to be very heterogeneous.

"It's common for enterprises to have 20, 50 or more different vendors," he said.

As a result, vendors are motivated to work well together, and limitations on interoperability aren't likely to be accepted by customers, he said.

For companies looking to deploy security automation technology, it's not enough to establish whether the vendor's product is ready for prime time.

The company has to be ready, as well, said Blankenship.

"It's definitely not a buy it and plug it in scenario," he said. "There's definitely ground work that needs to be done. If you plug bad data into an automated system, all you're going to do is make bad decisions faster."

In addition, many companies don't actually know what their processes are, and may not yet have well-defined playbooks, he said.

"Many have analysts that each do their own things as far as how they handle different investigations," he said. "In order to automate these things, you have to have standardization."

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Security automation is maturing, but many firms not ready for ... - CSO Online

LONDON, May 2, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Oil and gas terminals, often termed as oil and gas depots, tank farms or tank terminals, facilitate storage of oil, gas and related products. These are thus, intermediate hubs which store and facilitate the allocation of oil and gas to end users. Oil & gas terminal automation systems are integrated solutions which help in easier monitoring and manage of various product management operations, from receipt of products through storage and distribution. These systems comprise a set of integrated tools that enable access to real-time data, thus ensuring safety and efficient management of day-to-day terminal operations.

Highlights

The global oil and gas terminal automation market is forecast to register a CAGR of 7.1% in terms of value over the forecast period (2016-2026) driven primarily by relatively low oil prices and increasing demand for natural gas from a diverse set of industries.

Software segment is estimated to account for a relatively higher share in overall international oil and gas terminal automation market value as compared to that of services segments during forecast period

Asia Pacific excl. Japan and North America are expected to control the global oil and gas terminal automation market during forecast period

Key players in the global oil and gas terminal automation market are focusing on mergers and acquisitions strategy in order to better equip themselves to cater to steadily growing market demands

It is expected to register a CAGR of 7.2% during the forecast period, 2016-2026.

Growth in the demand for natural gas, supply-demand scenario and contango situation are expected to drive growth of global oil and gas terminal automation market during the forecast period

Relatively slower economic growth especially in oil consuming nations such as China, and crude oil supply glut experienced over the recent past have driven the global average crude oil prices southwards over the same period. Initial phase of forecast period is thus expected to be characterised by a contango situation resulting in increasing emphasis on storage of oil across the globe. Moreover, increasing demand for natural gas, especially liquefied natural gas is expected to result in emergence of several new terminals in North America and Asia Pacific, among other regions.

However, relatively higher costs associated with implementation of automation systems is expected to act as an impediment to the growth of global oil and gas terminal automation market during the forecast period. Besides, cyber threats and concerns associated regarding data security are likely to impede growth in adoption of such automation systems, especially among small terminal operators.

Market Segmentation

By Category - Hardware - ATG - Blending Controllers - SCADA - PLC - DCS - HMI - Safety - Security & Others - Software - Terminal & Inventory - Management - Business System - Integration - Transaction - Management - Reporting - Others - Services - Commissioning Services - Consulting Services - Project Mgmt. - Operations Management - Training Services

By Region - North America - Latin America - Western Europe - Eastern Europe - Asia Pacific excl. Japan - MEA - Japan

Software segment is estimated to account for a relatively higher share in overall global oil and gas terminal automation market value as compared to that of services segments during forecast period

Software segment is estimated to account for a share of 37.8% in overall global oil and gas terminal automation market value in 2016. It is expected to register a CAGR of 7.2% during the forecast period, 2016-2026. The segment is expected to dominate global oil and gas terminal automation market throughout the forecast period. Terminal and inventory management sub-segment of software segment is expected to relatively faster growth among other software sub-segments during the forecast period.

Asia Pacific excl. Japan and North America are expected to dominate the global oil and gas terminal automation market during forecast period

Surplus oil and gas production in North America, especially, in U.S. has, over the recent past, driven the growth in investment towards setting up of oil and gas export facilities in the region. Such a situation is expected to continue during forecast period, thus driving growth of oil and gas terminal automation market in the region during forecast period. Oil and gas terminal automation market in Asia Pacific excl. Japan region is expected to witness relatively faster growth, registering a CAGR of 8.8% during forecast period, in order to account for a share of nearly 32% in overall market value by 2026 end.

Key players in the global oil and gas terminal automation market are focussing on mergers and acquisitions strategy in order to better equip themselves to cater to steadily growing market demands

Some of the players operating in global oil and gas terminal automation market include, Yokogawa Electric Corporation, Emerson Electric Co., Honeywell International Inc., Rockwell Automation, Inc., ABB Group, Siemens AG, Schneider Electric SE, and FMC Technologies, Inc.

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Oil and Gas Terminal Automation Market is expected to register a CAGR of 7.2% during the forecast period, 2016-2026. - Yahoo Finance

Forbes

The Impact Of Automation On The Independent Workforce Forbes As workplace automation becomes more widespread, much has been said about negative repercussions for American workers. While automation has transformed and will continue to transform many industries, it largely redefines rather than eliminates jobs.

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The Impact Of Automation On The Independent Workforce - Forbes

In another series of workflow blogs we have been walking through the path of auditing the current workflow in your environment and identifying ways to optimize through automation. Its a long story that has been unfolding over many months. Along the way, many have asked specific questions about some of the fine points of automation and what tools would be on the must review list.

The characteristics of the products you should review begin with the user interface. If you are going to add a tool to automate as much of the workflow as possible, the user interface what you see when you are sitting at the computer screen becomes a critical deciding factor. Does the layout of the screen make sense to you and the team? Does it provide access to the key pieces of information about each job coming through the production process?

How much automation does the tool allow? Automation that requires constant manual intervention is not really automation, but there is a delicate balance. Any automation scheme that allows for too much manipulation by the team on the shop floor eliminates the benefits that automation should bring.

Also consider the changing needs that will surround your workflow. We know from our research, including the most recent North American and European Software Investment surveys, that dealing with a high number of small jobs is the single largest headache in many shops. Looks for tools that make this easy.

Today, workflow automation is more than just managing print production. Many projects require multi-channel delivery. Look for tools using a unified approach to job management with the flexibility to distribute the project across multiple types of delivery print or digital. Also look for tools that play well with others. Look for solutions that include a rich third-party solution provider program to allow you to customized the end-to-end solution for your environment. We know from experience that no two print shops work the same way, so why should you be forced down a singular path for automation that doesnt match your needs?

While the there are many offerings in the market, one that deserves review and consideration for its platform and breadth of partners is Ricoh ProcessDirector.

Ricoh ProcessDirector has an approach that begins with data preparation and composition and carries through postal optimization, output management, and mailing. ProcessDirector also has several archiving solutions and the ability to produce a full complement of management reports. It has a vibrant partnering program that allows clients to select the components that work for them. While it is clearly a match for Ricoh print environments, it is friendly enough to support a variety of output options beyond the Ricoh family. This solution also meets the brief for those growing the number of jobs due to expanding web-to-print portals which were identified as a bottleneck in our most recent US Production Software Investment Outlook.

(Click on chart to enlarge)

Another attractive feature is the ability to build a comprehensive workflow using drag and drop no coding needed. Creating this type of conditional logic is easy, including complex decision points on when to move jobs from one device to another. If your shops takes in work from many customers, but you find that many of those jobs have common characteristics, ProcessDirector has the ability to pull like components out of disparate jobs and run them together to maximize throughput.

Because of Ricohs long history supporting print and mail, ProcessDirector includes many of the features you need to optimize postal savings and guarantee postal integrity. Pair that with the Avanti Slingshot Connect feature and you have a true end-to-end workflow that tracks jobs from order entry to client delivery.

As with all workflow software, your production managers should do a thorough review to ensure the solutions automation capabilities will improve throughput and optimize production capacity. If you are working with mission-critical documents that must be tracked, are regulated, and contain personally identifiable information, Ricoh ProcessDirector should be on the list to consider.

If you have stories to share reach out to me! @PatMcGrew on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or Pat.McGrew@KeypointIntelligence.com all reach me.

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Solution Focus: Ricoh ProcessDirector in the World of Workflow Automation - Printing Impressions

In a conventional bank branch, a clerk seated next to the cash dispensing teller was a sought after banker because he used to update the pass book of the account holder after the cash withdrawal or a deposit. That job has almost vanished in the past decade with few account holders getting a pass book.

Coming years would see even the position of the teller, who is fast being replaced by sophisticated automated teller machines, and much more jobs going away as computing makes it possible to do more with less heads at the branches.

The banking industry which was among the big job creators along with the information technology industry in the past two decades is at an inflection point where technology is enhancing efficiency by doing more and at a faster pace than what humans could do.

Traditional jobs like passbook updating, cash deposit, verification of know-your-customer details, salary uploads are also going digital increasing job redundancies. The likes of Axis Bank, ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank are pushing the boundaries of technology by implementing robotics to centralise operations and for quicker turnarounds in things like loan processing and selling financial products to customers. This is reducing the need for a manual worker at the back end.

Look at the quintessential cheque book request, today 75 per cent of that happens digitally. Earlier, these customers used to walk into our branches, says Rajiv Anand, head retail banking at Axis Bank. There is increased automation within branches. We have more than 1,500 cash deposit machines, so why do I need a teller?.

A salary upload that we do monthly today there are 5 people who are doing the job and this will get automated. The linearity at the back end that as transactions go up the number of people should also go up has been broken.

The Indian banking industry has been witnessing a slow transition from people-driven to machines controlled in the past few years. The technological development, which has made banking easier, has also led to a slowdown in the hiring of staff at banks. Although there have been hirings, the nature of skill sets required is changing with a lot more focus on the front end talent.

Low-end back office jobs like data entries will no longer be required in the next three years. The rate of growth of new jobs in the banking sector will definitely come down, said Saurabh Tripathi, senior partner and director at BCG.

Low-skill workers do not have a bright future. They will have to reskill or perish. A sign of things to come is being witnessed at HDFC Bank, the countrys most valuable lender and the most expensive one among top lenders. The bank has not only been slowing branch expansion and hirings, it has also been reducing overall headcount even as it remains the gold standard of Indian banking.

HDFC saw staff strength fall for two-quarters in a row. The employee count fell by 6,096, or 7 per cent, to 84,325 in the quarter ended March 2017 from 90,421 in December 2016. At the same time, it has expanded its network to 4,715 branches, from 4,520 a year earlier, ATMs to 12,260 from 12,000.

It is not that we are asking people to resign and go away, says Paresh Sukthankar, DMD, HDFC Bank. Now we are saying while we will still add in certain areas as required, if based on productivity improvements you have people who are not gainfully employed in one particular function, you redeploy them in other areas. But after doing all that if we dont have the need for a certain number of people, we will not hire as many.

But the decline in bank jobs started even before the digital wave hit the banking industry. Indian banks employed nearly 13 lakh people at the end of March 2015, out of which state-run banks alone employ nearly 8.6 lakh people, while private sector banks employed 3.2 lakh people, a paltry growth of 3 per cent over March 2014, data from RBI shows.

Analytics and artificial intelligence are already being used by banks to do jobs once considered sacred, like underwriting loans. What this means is that human skills, which were considered imperative for basic banking not long ago, may not be required. We are now helping banks to underwrite on the spot, which means the underwriting skills as we know it may not be needed, said Piyush Singh, MD, financial services (Asia-Pacific), Accenture.

India is experiencing what banks in advanced countries have been doing for the past many years. Barclays chairman Anthony Jenkins warned of the Uber moment for banks a few years ago, and that is coming true.

The number of bank branches in the United States will shrink by as much as 20 per cent in five years and that could save as much as $8.3 billion annually if it trimmed the number of branches and downsized the average bank branch from 5,000 to 3,000 square feet, says Jones Lang Lasalle, a real estate consultant.

Citigroup has forecast that nearly a third of the jobs in the banking industry could be lost in the decade between 2015 and 2025. The future of branches in banking is about focusing on advisory and consultation rather than transactions, writes Jonathan Larsen, global head of retail and mortgages at Citi.

The return on having a physical network is diminishing. Branches and associated staff costs make up for about 65 per cent of the total retail cost base of a larger bank and a lot of these costs can be removed via automation.

Changing face While Indian banks havent started trimming the bank branches, the growth in the number and the size of branches has definitely come down. The growth rate of branch network in India halved at the end of 2016 to 5 per cent from 2010.

Likewise, ATM additions which grew at 9 per cent in 2016, was growing at over 40 per cent in 2010. Thanks to payments systems, banks do not need people at branches. The number of transactions on a digital network at the end of March 2016 was over 15.1 billion, up from 11.1 billion in the same period last year. That is essentially the number of cheques not issued.

Automation does not necessarily mean that there would no more be banking jobs. But they will be at a different level. Banks need to approach customers and educate them about financial products that are in the market.

Footprint increase is not the number one priority in absolute branch strength. Increasing reach and distribution is our priority. Reach and distribution we will increase through digital and more feet on street and relationship managers of the bank, said Shyam Srinivasan, CEO at Federal Bank.

New banks Also, the entry of new banks like small finance banks like Au Financiers, Equitas or Ujjivan would require an army of people as they expand to rural areas. Boots on the ground may be the mantra for these new banks which will have to marry technology with the human touch.

Automation for us means improving productivity to ensure my employees can do more. 50 per cent of our loans has to be with a ticket size of less than `25 lakh and 75 per cent priority sector. Our customers need hand-holding right from the application to the payment stage and we need people on the floor for that, said Sanjay Agarwal, MD at AU Financiers, which commenced small bank operations earlier this year.

AU Financiers plans to hire 4,000 people in the next six months. Total hiring in the next two to three years will be 10,000, Agarwal said. Then there is the microfinance turned-universal bank Bandhan, which plans to increase its workforce to 30,000 by March 2018 from 24,000 at present.

All our people (customers) are still not comfortable with digital banking. They need to see branches and go and ask questions. It will take time for digital banking to fully take shape. More is needed to be done, said Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, founder and MD at microfinance turned-universal bank Bandhan, which has 68 per cent of its branches in rural areas.

Just like the automobile industry, the banking industry will thrive and employ millions. But the way it would happen has been transformed. I think banks will continue to open branches and distribution networks, says Axis Anand. Financial services will continue to create jobs particularly at the front end but the rate of growth of that job creation will slow down, that is for sure.

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Threat of automation: Robotics and artificial intelligence to reduce job opportunities at top banks - Economic Times

If youre just about to start on your working life, you might be advised to stay away from such hands-on occupations as welder, floor assembler or boilermaker.

These three occupations are prime candidates for automation and make for the worst three entry-level jobs, according to a study released last week by personal finance Web site WalletHub.

Engineers, systems engineers and architects, on the other hand, represent good starting opportunities, according to the study.

Judged strictly by paycheck, tax attorneys made out the best, with a median starting salary of $93,899, or 5.8 times that of the lowest-paying job, that of college teaching assistant.

In coming up with their rankings for 109 entry-level jobs, the researchers weighed immediate opportunity, job hazards and occupational viability, or the probability of a certain occupation being replaced with a computer, says WalletHub senior analyst Jill Gonzalez.

The bottom five, according to this logic, are: tool and die maker, plumber, boilermaker, floor assembler and welder. The top five jobs engineer, systems engineer, architect, Web applications developer all by contrast require advanced education in science, technology, engineering and math.

The dismal rankings attained by many traditional blue-collar jobs, Gonzalez says, are largely the result of their having the highest probabilities of being automated. A lot of these jobs started to disappear decades ago.

Gonzalez also contrasts the high starting salaries garnered by tax attorneys with the more dismal prospects for tax accountants, who are being taken over by commercial software such as H&R Block.

If it is doing the same thing over and over again, and it doesnt require analysis, its going to be automated, says Ed Hess, professor of business administration at the University of Virginias Darden Graduate School of Business.

Were on the leading edge of a technology tsunami, he adds, predicting that 60 to 80 million U.S. jobs will be lost to automation over the next five to 15 years, destroyed by artificial intelligence, the internet of things and other technological developments. The question is, is this automation going to produce enough new jobs that technology itself cant do?

Hess advises those launching careers to pursue occupations that wont go away any time soon. Train to repair smart robots, train for a service job where you have to emotionally engage one-on-one to meet peoples individual needs, or get into a technology job and upgrade your skills every year, he suggests.

On the other hand, there are at least some manual skills that will continue to be in demand for the foreseeable future. The plumber or electrician that crawls under your house to see what the problem is is probably going to be all right, he says.

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Automation is killing the job market but don't be worried - New York Post