Category Archives: Automation

PLEASE, do not simply see my "not recommended" and assume I'm saying this is a bad game.

The concept behind this is absolutely amazing, and I want this game to be finished so badly. The way things are set up (so far) are very easy to learn, and work well. The creation system is basically broken down into a series of many choices, with explanations for the impacts of your choices when the option is moused over. The fluidity of the system thus far only makes me more anxious to play the finished product.

Now, to the point. I do not recommend this game to anyone, as it currently exists. I have been burned quite a few times by early access games, and I usually take a stance of not buying them under any circumstances. My excitement for this concept got the better of me, and I just had to know if it was good.

As of the time of this writing, the tycoon/campaign mode has not been implemented. All you can do is create cars/engines etc. It is entertaining for a little while, but not enough to be worth the price. That is why I don't recommend this. I do recommend that you keep a very close eye on this one, if this concept interests you, and consider buying it when the tycoon mode has been added.

If the devs do this right, this could be an absolutely amazing game. My advice is simply to wait and see how they do with the first major addition to this game.

I will update/change this review as updates are released for the game.

EDIT (23 June 2015): I just hopped on again to test it out since I haven't touched this one in a while, and I still stand by what I said. The bug fixes and improvements made since my review are very apparent. The whole car making process is very smooth, and still fun. It appears the devs are trying to get the creation process completely done before implementing the campaign/tycoon. I regularly check the announcements, and haven't heard them mention anything about that mode coming anytime soon. I find this particularly strange, considering they're in the open beta stage of the game. Why would they consider the game to be in the beta phase when not a single piece of the main game mode has been implemented, or even said to be coming soon? Personally, I think the creation mode is in a good enough state where they could easily get to work on tycoon mode, and throw small bug fixes and content updates here and there. Every time I play this game, I find myself disappointed when I reach the end of the creation process and then have to say "well...I guess that's it." and then go play something else. For me, at least, it feels like a waste of time to make a car, and not be able to do anything with it.

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Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game on Steam

A letter from our founder

Friends of EVA,

I am beyond thrilled to announce that we have acquired Bowers & Wilkinsin my opinion, the absolute quality and design leader in high-end audio equipment. Ive personally been a huge fan and loyal customer of Bowers & Wilkins for decades and truly admire and respect their Chairman, Joe Atkins. What he and his team have created over the past 30 years is simply inspiring.

Since I founded EVA Automation two years ago, we have been working hard to create fantastic home A/V user experiences. When it was time to seek out partners for our journey ahead, Bowers & Wilkins was unquestionably our #1 choice, and after I met Joe and his team, it was immediately clear that we share the same long term product vision and sincere passion for home entertainment.

To my new friends at Bowers & Wilkins: I cant wait to meet all of you! Your brand and heritage are second to none, and we at EVA are excited to operate as one combined company under the Bowers & Wilkins name. Joe Atkins has graciously agreed to remain the CEO of our combined company, while I will be our Executive Chairman. There are very few leaders in home A/V as experienced, respected and successful as Joe, and I look forward to partnering with and learning from himand all of you.

One of the most important parts of our acquisition is that Joe is maintaining a significant equity stake in our combined company and will be joining our board of directors, further aligning all of our interests.

We will have much, much more to announce when the time is right about our vision and our products. In the meantime, we will continue to work hard on developing a truly special, highly integrated, and easy to use home A/V experience that I know youll love.

Until then,

Gideon Yu Executive Chairman Bowers & Wilkins

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As the automation of physical and knowledge work advances, many jobs will be redefined rather than eliminatedat least in the short term.

The potential of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics to perform tasks once reserved for humans is no longer reserved for spectacular demonstrations by the likes of IBMs Watson, Rethink Robotics Baxter, DeepMind, or Googles driverless car. Just head to an airport: automated check-in kiosks now dominate many airlines ticketing areas. Pilots actively steer aircraft for just three to seven minutes of many flights, with autopilot guiding the rest of the journey. Passport-control processes at some airports can place more emphasis on scanning document bar codes than on observing incoming passengers.

What will be the impact of automation efforts like these, multiplied many times across different sectors of the economy? Can we look forward to vast improvements in productivity, freedom from boring work, and improved quality of life? Should we fear threats to jobs, disruptions to organizations, and strains on the social fabric?

Earlier this year, we launched research to explore these questions and investigate the potential that automation technologies hold for jobs, organizations, and the future of work. Our results to date suggest, first and foremost, that a focus on occupations is misleading. Very few occupations will be automated in their entirety in the near or medium term. Rather, certain activities are more likely to be automated, requiring entire business processes to be transformed, and jobs performed by people to be redefined, much like the bank tellers job was redefined with the advent of ATMs.

More specifically, our research suggests that as many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. In the United States, these activities represent about $2 trillion in annual wages. Although we often think of automation primarily affecting low-skill, low-wage roles, we discovered that even the highest-paid occupations in the economy, such as financial managers, physicians, and senior executives, including CEOs, have a significant amount of activity that can be automated.

The organizational and leadership implications are enormous: leaders from the C-suite to the front line will need to redefine jobs and processes so that their organizations can take advantage of the automation potential that is distributed across them. And the opportunities extend far beyond labor savings. When we modeled the potential of automation to transform business processes across several industries, we found that the benefits (ranging from increased output to higher quality and improved reliability, as well as the potential to perform some tasks at superhuman levels) typically are between three and ten times the cost. The magnitude of those benefits suggests that the ability to staff, manage, and lead increasingly automated organizations will become an important competitive differentiator.

Our research is ongoing, and in 2016, we will release a detailed report. What follows here are four interim findings elaborating on the core insight that the road ahead is less about automating individual jobs wholesale, than it is about automating the activities within occupations and redefining roles and processes.

These preliminary findings are based on data for the US labor market. We structured our analysis around roughly 2,000 individual work activities, and assessed the requirements for each of these activities against 18 different capabilities that potentially could be automated (Exhibit 1). Those capabilities range from fine motor skills and navigating in the physical world, to sensing human emotion and producing natural language. We then assessed the automatability of those capabilities through the use of current, leading-edge technology, adjusting the level of capability required for occupations where work occurs in unpredictable settings.

Exhibit 1

The bottom line is that 45 percent of work activities could be automated using already demonstrated technology. If the technologies that process and understand natural language were to reach the median level of human performance, an additional 13 percent of work activities in the US economy could be automated. The magnitude of automation potential reflects the speed with which advances in artificial intelligence and its variants, such as machine learning, are challenging our assumptions about what is automatable. Its no longer the case that only routine, codifiable activities are candidates for automation and that activities requiring tacit knowledge or experience that is difficult to translate into task specifications are immune to automation.

In many cases, automation technology can already match, or even exceed, the median level of human performance required. For instance, Narrative Sciences artificial-intelligence system, Quill, analyzes raw data and generates natural language, writing reports in seconds that readers would assume were written by a human author. Amazons fleet of Kiva robots is equipped with automation technologies that plan, navigate, and coordinate among individual robots to fulfill warehouse orders roughly four times faster than the companys previous system. IBMs Watson can suggest available treatments for specific ailments, drawing on the body of medical research for those diseases.

According to our analysis, fewer than 5 percent of occupations can be entirely automated using current technology. However, about 60 percent of occupations could have 30 percent or more of their constituent activities automated. In other words, automation is likely to change the vast majority of occupationsat least to some degreewhich will necessitate significant job redefinition and a transformation of business processes. Mortgage-loan officers, for instance, will spend much less time inspecting and processing rote paperwork and more time reviewing exceptions, which will allow them to process more loans and spend more time advising clients. Similarly, in a world where the diagnosis of many health issues could be effectively automated, an emergency room could combine triage and diagnosis and leave doctors to focus on the most acute or unusual cases while improving accuracy for the most common issues.

As roles and processes get redefined, the economic benefits of automation will extend far beyond labor savings. Particularly in the highest-paid occupations, machines can augment human capabilities to a high degree, and amplify the value of expertise by increasing an individuals work capacity and freeing the employee to focus on work of higher value. Lawyers are already using text-mining techniques to read through the thousands of documents collected during discovery, and to identify the most relevant ones for deeper review by legal staff. Similarly, sales organizations could use automation to generate leads and identify more likely opportunities for cross-selling and upselling, increasing the time frontline salespeople have for interacting with customers and improving the quality of offers.

Conventional wisdom suggests that low-skill, low-wage activities on the front line are the ones most susceptible to automation. Were now able to scrutinize this view using the comprehensive database of occupations we created as part of this research effort. It encompasses not only occupations, work activities, capabilities, and their automatability, but also the wages paid for each occupation.

Our work to date suggests that a significant percentage of the activities performed by even those in the highest-paid occupations (for example, financial planners, physicians, and senior executives) can be automated by adapting current technology. For example, we estimate that activities consuming more than 20 percent of a CEOs working time could be automated using current technologies. These include analyzing reports and data to inform operational decisions, preparing staff assignments, and reviewing status reports. Conversely, there are many lower-wage occupations such as home health aides, landscapers, and maintenance workers, where only a very small percentage of activities could be automated with technology available today (Exhibit 2).

Exhibit 2

Capabilities such as creativity and sensing emotions are core to the human experience and also difficult to automate. The amount of time that workers spend on activities requiring these capabilities, though, appears to be surprisingly low. Just 4 percent of the work activities across the US economy require creativity at a median human level of performance. Similarly, only 29 percent of work activities require a median human level of performance in sensing emotion.

While these findings might be lamented as reflecting the impoverished nature of our work lives, they also suggest the potential to generate a greater amount of meaningful work. This could occur as automation replaces more routine or repetitive tasks, allowing employees to focus more on tasks that utilize creativity and emotion. Financial advisors, for example, might spend less time analyzing clients financial situations, and more time understanding their needs and explaining creative options. Interior designers could spend less time taking measurements, developing illustrations, and ordering materials, and more time developing innovative design concepts based on clients desires.

These interim findings, emphasizing the clarity brought by looking at automation through the lens of work activities as opposed to jobs, are in no way intended to diminish the pressing challenges and risks that must be understood and managed. Clearly, organizations and governments will need new ways of mitigating the human costs, including job losses and economic inequality, associated with the dislocation that takes place as companies separate activities that can be automated from the individuals who currently perform them. Other concerns center on privacy, as automation increases the amount of data collected and dispersed. The quality and safety risks arising from automated processes and offerings also are largely undefined, while the legal and regulatory implications could be enormous. To take one case: who is responsible if a driverless school bus has an accident?

Nor do we yet have a definitive perspective on the likely pace of transformation brought by workplace automation. Critical factors include the speed with which automation technologies are developed, adopted, and adapted, as well as the speed with which organization leaders grapple with the tricky business of redefining processes and roles. These factors may play out differently across industries. Those where automation is mostly software based can expect to capture value much faster and at a far lower cost. (The financial-services sector, where technology can readily manage straight-through transactions and trade processing, is a prime example.) On the other hand, businesses that are capital or hardware intensive, or constrained by heavy safety regulation, will likely see longer lags between initial investment and eventual benefits, and their pace of automation may be slower as a result.

All this points to new top-management imperatives: keep an eye on the speed and direction of automation, for starters, and then determine where, when, and how much to invest in automation. Making such determinations will require executives to build their understanding of the economics of automation, the trade-offs between augmenting versus replacing different types of activities with intelligent machines, and the implications for human skill development in their organizations. The degree to which executives embrace these priorities will influence not only the pace of change within their companies, but also to what extent those organizations sharpen or lose their competitive edge.

Michael Chui is a principal at the McKinsey Global Institute, where James Manyika is a director; Mehdi Miremadi is a principal in McKinseys Chicago office.

The authors wish to thank McKinseys Rick Cavolo, Martin Dewhurst, Katy George, Andrew Grant, Sean Kane, Bill Schaninger, Stefan Spang, and Paul Willmott for their contributions to this article.

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Four fundamentals of workplace automation | McKinsey & Company

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Rohtek Automation

Thank you to our attendees, GE Digital, Kepware Technologies, our tabletop exhibitors and sponsors for helping to create a sold-out event. We hope to see you all next year!

The Automation Conference & Expo is the leading peer-to-peer educational and networking event for industrial automation professionals. As an attendee, youll learn why todays automation innovations are critical for your operation. This years knowledge exchange took place May 24-25 at the Chicago Marriott OHare, offering technology end-users the ability to:

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Our program is designed for automation professionals in the process industries, discrete manufacturing and packaging, and includes general and track sessions; in-depth Technology Workshops and tabletop exhibits, staffed by solutions experts.

The 2016 conference program explored todays hottest manufacturing trends and challenges:

Our pre-conference event, Machine Technology Day, covered these issues:

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Learn more about collaborative robotics at this year's Automation Conference & Expo. Demands from a range of industries are driving the rapid development of cage-free robots that work alongside humans. Heres a look at some of the latest developments.Read more

Next gen HMIs and PackML will be featured at this years event. Heres a recent article about how OEMs balance flexibility with familiarity in the human machine interface and the value of PackML. Read more

The Automation Conference & Expo 2016 (AC&E) will explore trends and technologies that drive increased efficiency, profits and safety for manufacturers across all industries. Practical applications of IIoT, collaborative robotics, cybersecurity and other technologies will be featured May 24-25 in Chicago.Read more

Its only been about four years now since the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) really began to pick up steam. Read more

If you are a U.S. manufacturer, you already know this fact: skilled people are hard to find. From production line workers, to skilled trade people, technicians, and engineers, finding the right skillsets to support your production is a significant challenge... Read more

The Organization for Machine Automation and Control (OMAC) is offering a PackML Workshop in conjunction with Machine Technology Day, May 23 in Chicago. This half-day training focuses on distinct PackML implementation tasks for packaging end-users, integrators, and OEMs.Read more

Annual industrial automation conference, May 24-25 in Chicago, offers discounted registration rate for women in manufacturing.Read more

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