Category Archives: Automation

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Welcome to Take Five with Automation World. Im David Greenfield, Director of Content, and today were going to look at how industrial communicationsnamely OPC UA and MQTTenable interoperability. While the objectives and goals of production operations within manufacturing and processing companies vary widely, there is one thing that you could probably get every plant manager, engineer, and operator to agree on.

And the two most prominent players in this space are OPC UA and MQTT. Both of these communication methods are supported by all the major industrial protocol organizations as well as most automation technology suppliers. So lets look at how they both target device and system interoperability.

OPC UA is a platform-independent, service-oriented architecture thats used in nearly every industry vertical, from oil and gas to pharmaceuticals to automotive. Mike Clark, director of the OPC Foundation North America, says OPC UA is so widely used because of its secure, repeatable data modeling. He explained that OPC UA uses data modeling to scale semantically identical messages across the entire manufacturing enterprise from sensors to the cloud. In particular, Mike noted that, with OPC UA, you dont need to translate, map, or manipulate data as it moves from sensors to the cloud, as those data models are preserved in OPC UA.

Robert Trask, who works with theEtherCAT Technology Group says the way OPC UA handles information across devices has made it a popular interface for higher level communications between controllerseven controllers from different vendors. He adds that more companies are using OPC UA as an interface to streamline the exchange of real-time data, monitoring of alarms and events, and access to historical data. The use of OPC UA is so widespread across industry that many consider it to be the de facto standard for data transfer in the automation industry since its already present in most plants today. In fact, OPC UA use is so ubiquitous that its even being transported by MQTT.

MQTT is a low-overhead data transport mechanism originally developed for Phillips 66 in the late 1990s. Since then its been adopted for applications ranging from Facebook Messenger and Amazon Web Services to manufacturing facilities and power plants. The data agnostic nature of MQTT, which means that users can publish anything they want on any topic using MQTT, led to its wide use across numerous different types of businesses, but limited its use in the industrial space.

As Arlen Nipper, chief technology officer at Cirrus Link Solutions and co-inventor of MQTT, explained: Many automation hardware and software providers have been using MQTT, but each were using their own definitions of topics and payloads since those structures werent designed into MQTT.

This meant that, even though an MQTT infrastructure was being used, there was no plug-and-play or interoperability between the different hardware and software products on the market. And thats what the open-source software specification known as Sparkplug was designed to address. It defines an operations technology-centric topic namespace and payload definition for industrial process variables in MQTT, as well as session state management, which is needed with real-time SCADA systems. Essentially, Sparkplug provides MQTT with the ability to integrate data from applications, sensors, devices, and gateways in an industrial Internet of Things infrastructure.

In June of 2022, the Sparkplug Working Group, which is run by the Eclipse Foundation, announced the launch of the Sparkplug Compatibility Program. This program is designed to help end users know if the automation systems theyre using are Sparkplug compatible. The program tests automation technologies with the Sparkplug Technology Compatibility Kit, which is an open-source test suite that validates conformance to the specification. Products passing the test will be featured in the official list of compatible products, available on theSparkplug Working Groups website. Products that pass the test will also be able to display the Sparkplug Compatible logo to make it easy for users to know if the product is, in fact, compatible.

Needless to say, theres a lot more information about OPC UA and MQTT on the automationworld.com site in addition to the links highlighted in this video. So be sure to check it out.

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How OPC UA and MQTT Enable Interoperability - Automation World

We have seen a spate of cloud service provider outages with overly negative economic impact. The AWS outage in December 2021 disrupted Disney+, Ticketmaster, Slack and Netflix, among a host of others. The Facebook (now Meta) outage in October 2021 was particularly painful. It not only took down WhatsApp and Messenger, but also the livelihood of many small businesses in the developing world. Their services were down for almost six hours because of their dependency on Facebook as an authentication service and WhatsApp and Messenger for order-taking services.

The single culprit responsible for these outages? Service misconfiguration driven by human error. In fact, most misconfigurations are introduced through inadvertent human mistakes. Yet others can be the result of natural disasters. Regardless of the cause, the solution to recovery from such outages and business disasters is automating with the right actions.

There are many reasons to automate. Some of the more common reasons include offsetting resource constraints as well as adding safety guards and creating more efficiencies around configuration management, compliance, or monitoring processes.

For instance, lets say you have a development engineer with an application that requires testing with a load balancer before release. The developer may not have the time or motivation to learn the networking and security language.

In a traditional process, a help-desk ticket would be opened. Then a network administrator would reach out to the developer, get information about the use case, and create a custom load balancer for the developer to use for testing. This process is time-consuming and expensive and creates inefficiencies around testing and deployment. To further complicate the process, if security needs to be tested and provisioned, another ticket is required.

In an automated process, on the other hand, the objective is to provide a self-service application in a language the developer can understand. The developer would test the application against the load balancer without involving IT in the process. If multiple devices, environments (on-premise and multi-cloud) or required skill sets (networking vs security) are involved, then an orchestration workflow could be created.

[You may also like: Cybercriminals Use Automation, Here is Why You Should, Too]

The benefit of automation and self-service is not just shaving time off provisioning, testing and deployment processes, but also reducing the amount of expertise required to provision networking and security components that developers may not be familiar with. In many cases where services are being provisioned and tested on new platforms, automation and self-service also save IT teams from having to quickly become experts in new domains.

There are several basic considerations that go into purchasing automation tools. First and foremost, before purchasing automation tools, you should do a proof of concept to ensure they meet your business needs. Its important to assess how easy the tools are to use and whether they can actually automate the tasks that you require. Make sure you pick tools that will help you simplify individual tasks and remove complexity and that are easily consumable by your users. Many workflow and automation tools exist, from LAMP stack, OpenStack, and Ansible, to built-in Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and Google GCP tools, and other orchestration engines, such as VMware vRealize Suite.

Second, its important to determine whether the automation tools integrate with other tools in your portfolio, including your orchestration engine as well as SIEM, configuration management, incident response, and logging tools.

Finally, the automation tools should allow you to schedule tasks and support deployments across a variety environments, including on-premise and cloud.

Automation success is made up of several incremental steps that build upon each other. To start the process of automation, its important to identify all use cases that are prone to introducing errors in configuration. Below are four common use cases:

Next, script the processes using CLI or python scripts. Then, youre ready to automate.

[You may also like: Securing Applications in the Multi-Cloud: Where Should Organizations Start?]

Unplanned service outages or slow response to user requests from network, service and application misconfigurations, lack of application resource availability, compliance and security posture checks, unsuccessful backups can all impact a business. The key benefit of automating many of these tasks that have manual steps is to reduce service downtime and avert disasters like the ones seen by AWS and Facebook, which can be expensive and damage a brand.

Stay tuned: In a follow-up blog, well highlight a few automation use cases relevant to DevOps, NetOps and SecOps.

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Why Automation is a Must Have for Disaster Recovery - Security Boulevard

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "Industrial Automation Market Forecast to 2028 - COVID-19 Impact and Global Analysis By Component, System Type and End Users" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Industrial Automation Market is expected to reach US$ 233.94 billion by 2028, registering a CAGR of 7.6% from 2021 to 2028.

Automation in the food & beverages industry refers to strategic integrations of technologies across various production processes, such as inspection, packaging, and storage.

Over the years, food & beverages companies have optimized different production processes through the uptake of automated systems, such as delta robots, automated guided vehicles, and robotic arms, to be in line with various food safety & quality standards laid down by regulatory bodies and reduce overall labor cost across production sites.

Vision-guided robots are experiencing a rise in demand across the industrial automation market due to their efficiency in completing repetitive tasks, such as bottle handling, bin picking, and tray loading. Numerous benefits, including enhanced traceability, improved efficiency, and high flexibility, have been driving the need for automation in the food & beverage industry over the years.

These factors have encouraged food & beverage producers to invest heavily in automated technology integration across their production facilities. For instance, a US-based snack brand, Utz Brands Inc., announced its plans to integrate automated capabilities across its production plants to reduce its overall operational cost in 2021.

Similarly, Hormel Foods is also planning to incorporate automation across its production facilities in 2022. Other food & beverage brands rapidly adopting automated technology include Tyson Foods and ITC. Thus, the rise in investment in automation across the food & beverage industry is fueling the growth of the industrial automation market.

The MEA industrial automation market is negatively impacted by the disruption in the supply chain of robotics and related components. The demand for industrial automation solutions such as sensors, robots, and machine vision systems has weakened marginally since the eruption of COVID-19 in the MEA countries.

This led to a loss of revenue among the automation solutions manufacturers, distributors, system integrators, and service providers offering their products in the region in 2020. However, as the region showcased a positive trend for adopting automation systems, owing to government containment measures, which propelled the adoption of industrial automation solutions such as robots, sensors, and machine vision systems from 2021.

APAC held the largest market share in 2020, followed by Europe and North America. APAC is further anticipated to register the highest CAGR in the industrial automation market during the forecast period. The increasing uptake by various industries and the growing penetration of advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of thing (IoT), are fueling the industrial automation market size.

Company Profiles

Key Topics Covered:

1. Introduction

2. Industrial Automation Market- Key Takeaways

3. Research Methodology

4. Industrial Automation Market Landscape

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 PEST Analysis

4.3 Ecosystem Analysis

4.4 Expert Opinion

5. Industrial Automation Market - Key Industry Dynamics

5.1 Market Drivers

5.1.1 Rising Uptake of Automation across Food & Beverage Industry

5.1.2 Increase in Machine Vision Systems Adoption for Industrial Automation

5.2 Key Market Restraints

5.2.1 Requirement of High Initial Investment

5.3 Key Market Opportunities

5.3.1 Integration of Robotics in the Construction Industry

5.4 Future Trends

5.4.1 Surging Demand for Automation in the E-commerce Industry

5.5 Impact Analysis of Drivers and Restraints

6. Industrial Automation Market - Key Market Dynamics

6.1 Wearable Sensor Market Overview

6.2 Global Industrial Automation Market Forecast And Analysis

6.3 Market Positioning of Key Players

7. Industrial Automation Market Analysis - By Component

7.1 Overview

7.2 Industrial Automation Market, By Component (2020 and 2028)

7.3 Hardware

7.3.1 Overview

7.3.2 Hardware: Industrial Automation Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (US$ Billion)

7.3.3 Motors and Drives

7.3.4 Robots

7.3.5 Sensor

7.3.6 Machine Vision System

7.4 Software

8. Industrial Automation Market Analysis - By System

8.1 Overview

8.2 Industrial Automation Market, By System (2020 and 2028)

8.3 Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition

8.3.1 Overview

8.3.2 Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition: Industrial Automation Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (US$ Billion)

8.4 Distributed Control System

8.5 Programmable Logic Control

9. Industrial Automation Market Analysis - By End User

9.1 Overview

9.2 Industrial Automation Market, By End User (2020 and 2028)

9.3 Oil & Gas

9.3.1 Overview

9.3.2 Oil & Gas: Industrial Automation Market - Revenue and Forecast to 2028 (US$ Billion)

9.4 Automotive

9.5 Food & Beverage

9.6 Chemical & Materials

9.7 Aerospace & Defense

10. Industrial Automation Market - Geographic Analysis

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/7u7n0n

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Global Industrial Automation Markets, 2021-2022 & 2028: Surging Demand in the e-Commerce Industry & Integration of Robotics in the...

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Indoor AgTech Innovation Summit Harpak-ULMA, the industry leader in smart, connected packaging solutions, announced its collaboration with indoor aquaponic vertical farming company Upward Farms to launch fully automated, scalable packaging operations in support of the companys rapid growth and expansion plans. Brooklyn-based Upward Farms state-of-the-art 250,000-square-foot facility in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania is expected to commence operations in 2023. Upwards Farms fresh, locally grown microgreens and sustainably raised hybrid striped bass are available to consumers throughout New York City, Westchester, and New Jersey, with plans to expand distribution throughout the Northeast and beyond. The companys commitment to innovative and sustainable farming techniques is made possible through the use of advanced automation and digital technologies designed to transform farming techniques into next-gen, information-centric, production capabilities.

Packaging processes represent a significant proportion of production operations for companies that produce minimally processed natural products making packaging quality, throughput, and world-class OEE the key to optimizing and scaling output. Completing the picture with end-to-end automation (from product loading to palletization) all but eliminates operational performance variations attributed to manual or semi-manual processes. Harpak-ULMAs smart, connected design offers ruggedized reliability for accurate high-volume, low-waste packaging applications. Minimizing waste, one of the keys to more sustainable packaging, is well aligned with Upwards Farms manufacturing strategy. The companys autonomous, self-optimizing, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform represents sustainability at its most innovative.

Harpak-ULMAs platforms employ sophisticated smart controls that enable advanced self-diagnostics, remote connectivity and monitoring, as well as augmented-reality experiences for operations and maintenance. Leveraging digital technologies in packaging processes not only enhances production agility, flexibility, and scalability it ensures a consistent digital thread across enterprise operations, the key to performance visibility and management.

Harpak-ULMA shares our forward-looking philosophy of sustainability, innovation, and automation notes Ben Silverman, Upward Farms CTO and Co-Founder. "We have demonstrated the difference technology creates in the controlled environment agriculture sector as they [sic. Harpak-ULMA] create in packaging. That sort of philosophical alignment around whats possible creates a solid partner for our aggressive growth strategy. Kevin Roach, Harpak-ULMAs CEO added, We are extremely happy that Upward Farms elected to collaborate with us on such an important advancement in food production. Vertical aquaponic farming advances food chain sustainability tremendously including a very positive impact on food distribution and its associated reduction in carbon footprint. Combining next generation production and packaging technologies allows us to re-invent the feasibility and profitability of sustainable food production and distribution practices. We are very proud to play a role in such an important and much-needed project.

For more information on Harpak-ULMA packaging, visit http://www.harpak-ulma.com or call 800-813-6644.

About Upward Farms

Based in Brooklyn, NY, Upward Farms is a breakthrough vertical farming company bringing whole ecosystems into controlled environment agriculture through aquaponic farming of leafy greens, fish, and a robust and beneficial microbiome. Founded in 2013 and led by CEO and Cofounder Jason Green, Upward Farms is the only large-scale vertical farm offering locally grown, washed and ready to eat USDA Certified Organic leafy greens and Best Aquaculture Practices-certified fish. Upward Farms grows and packs superior quality microgreens bursting with delicious flavor and nutrients that are best-selling products at Whole Foods Market. As a leader in the science behind regenerative agriculture, Upward Farms understands the role of the microbiome in the health of the soils and waters that produce the food on our plate. To learn more, visit http://www.upwardfarms.com.

About Harpak-ULMA

Harpak-ULMA is the North American arm of ULMA, a $1B industry leader in complete packaging line solutions for Food, Medical, Bakery, and Industrial products. Harpak-ULMA provides smart, connected packaging systems utilizing Rockwell Automations controls and information platforms to deliver greater efficiency, uptime, and throughput, as well as better package quality and reduced waste. Well-designed, reliable solutions reduce customers total cost of ownership, help them overcome the challenges of an aging and evolving workforce, and improve control of maintenance expenses with competitive parts sourcing. In addition to offering ULMA primary packaging systems and comprehensive automation solutions, Harpak-ULMA is the exclusive North American distributor of G. Mondini tray sealers. Harpak-ULMA joined the Rockwell Automation Partner Network in 2018 as part of its initiative to build and deploy smart, connected packaging solutions.

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Upward Farms Scales its Packaging Automation - Business Wire

These online courses could prepare you for a role as an RPA developer, tester, solution architect, automation engineer and more.

With a new report this week suggesting all workers will need some knowledge of AI, learning some of the core competencies involved in automative technologies could also stand to you in your career. A good grounding in automation and machine learning is beneficial for developers, tech entrepreneurs and anyone with an interest in solving problems.

Some of the most in-demand jobs in the automation sector at the moment include RPA developers, solution architects, RPA controllers, testers and process mining consultants. These roles require people who are willing to upskill and keep on top of the developments in the sector.

Doing a short course is a great way of brushing up on your technical skills. Whether youre a beginner or you have some experience, theres a course out there for you. Many on this list are free or relatively inexpensive compared to a full degree course.

Heres our pick of some of the automation courses out there.

Intelligent process automation (IPA) is a nascent aspect of the already widely used robotic process automation (RPA).

This course is run by Automation Anywhere and is aimed at business users, developers and automation enthursiasts. It offersquick video tutorials that you can watch in your own time.

The course provider recommends that you do its beginners RPA course before the IPA course if you dont already have a good grounding in the former.

Despite its no frills title, this course actually offers a lot. It includes more than nine hours of on-demand video and 95 downloadable resources designed to help you in your quest to automate the boring stuff.

Aimed at office workers, administrators and students who want to improve their productivity, it is a course for beginners covering basic concepts.

By the end of this course, youll be able to write code that not only dramatically increases your productivity, but also be able to list this fun and creative skill on your resume, the course promises.

Google offers a fast-paced practical introduction to machine learning in this 15-hour course that features 25 lessons and more than 30 exercises.

You can learn from Googles machine learning researchers using real-world examples and interactive visualisations of the algorithms at work. Its recommended that you have some experience with programming and Python prior to doing the course.

This course is run by Google on Coursera as part of the tech giants Google Career Certificates initiative. It is free to enrol and at the end of the course youll get a certificate that is shareable on LinkedIn.

The programme can be completed in around six months if you put in around 10 hours a week as suggested. The course work can be completed in your own time and deadlines can be set based on your schedule.

Youll learn how to automate tasks by writing Python scripts, use Git and GitHub for version control and solve IT problems.

Developed by lecturers from the University of Minnesota, this course is aimed at beginner to intermediate software developers.

It is free to enrol and takes around four months to complete. You will learn about black-box and white-box testing, automated testing, web and mobile testing, as well as formal testing theory and techniques.

By the end of the course, you will be able to plan and perform effective testing of your software.

For those looking for a longer course on automation, this level 7 course is run by the new South East Technological University (SETU).

It is a Springboard course, which means it is Government subsidised. It lasts one year and delivery is a mix of online classes and in-person lectures on campus.

The course was developed in consultation with several automation and manufacturing companies in the south-east region. Learners will graduate with the skills to work in an in-demand sector.

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6 courses to help you get to grips with automation and machine learning - Siliconrepublic.com

The founders of ConductorOne, an identity and access control startup, both came from Okta, which is itself a single sign-on vendor based on the zero trust model. In fact, they were in charge of authentication and zero-trust products and saw firsthand how companies were struggling to control permissions and access across a complex environment that often included not just cloud applications but also on-premises pieces mixed in as well.

They decided to move on and start a company to help solve that particular set of problems with the goal of automating a lot of the access control activities that up to this point have been done manually, or worse, not at all.

Today the company announced a $15 million Series A.

CTO and co-founder Paul Querna said they were keenly aware of the pain points companies were facing around these issues. Permissions and access management is still very painful to end users and IT teams or the engineering team managing all of this, he told TechCrunch. Thats because with a malfunctioning permissions system, you can underprovision, keep people waiting to use the tools they need to do their job, or overprovision such as maintaining permission for users who are no longer working at your company. I think a lot of us have seen firsthand these kinds of experiences, Querna said.

His co-founder and CEO Alex Bovee adds that they wanted to make it easier for companies to control these access management tasks and bring the principle of least privilege to the solution. We started ConductorOne to really automate as much as possible from an identity security perspective how people get access, retain access and revoke access to help companies achieve more of a least privilege level of access control, Bovee told me.

The former Okta employees see their company solving a distinctly different problem than their former employer around securing identity. They do a great job of centralizing some of your corporate users into a central directory. I think when you think about identity from a security perspective, its fundamentally about understanding all the identities in your environment, whether or not theyre connected to your SSO solutions, he said.

He adds, Its also about understanding the permissions, the roles, the data that those different identities can access. So we are taking much more of an orchestration centric view. Frankly, its just a different architecture, more of an orchestration view and visibility first view across your environment to be able to give you that as a security and GRC (governance, risk, compliance) team, and then building the workflows on top of that to execute it,

Part of the way it works is through out-of-the-box integrations to popular services like Okta, GitHub, Slack, Datadog, Jira and so forth to understand whats happening across the company and what actions could be having an impact on someones permission to access a program. Its worth noting, however, that they can work with any corporate directory solution beyond Okta.

Today, the startup has 17 employees with plans to double that by years end. Bovee says that building a diverse workforce is written into the companys original values documents. We posted our company values very early on. Its one of our first blog posts, and I think one of the mechanisms to attract that talent, especially early in the sourcing funnel, is to be public and transparent about how you want to run the company and emphasize that you believe in diversity and you want that as part of your company culture, he said.

Todays $15 million Series A investment was led by Accel with participation from existing investors Fuel Capital, Fathom Capital and Active Capital along with several prominent industry angels. The company raised a $5 million seed round last year, which was also led by Accel.

The new funding should help them start rounding out the longer-term vision for the company. Our vision and strategy for the product long term is to automate that full lifecycle across access control. So not only the on-boarding process, but eventually the off-boarding process and handling things like time-based access control, so its not even an issue in the first place because you grant the access for a period of time and then remove it, Bovee explained.

See the original post here:

ConductorOne is bringing automation to identity and access management with $15M investment - TechCrunch

Increased use of AI can drive efficiencies and reduce costs in compliance management. Heres what that means for CIOs in highly regulated industries.

Complying professionals can utilize automation tools rather than investing in additional solutions to decrease capital expenditures, expedite compliance, and increase flexibility.

These solutions enable businesses across various industries to automate repetitive procedures, speed up business processes to increase efficiency and production, lower costs, and eliminate errors. Enterprises can expand the possibilities of automation with cognitive capabilities by combining RPA and AI, thereby increasing business value and competitiveness.

Here are five ways in which the convergence of two cutting-edge technologies is reshaping enterprises and assisting them in realizing the enormous value in a crowded, competitive environment:

A financial institution may be required to process up to 300 million pages of new regulations broadcast by numerous state, federal, or local authorities through a variety of channels in a single year. While RPA can be programmed to collect rules changes, the regulations must be comprehended and applied to business operations. This is where sophisticated OCR, NLP, and AI models are employed.

OCR can transform regulatory texts into machine-readable texts. The papers are sorted using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to comprehend intricate sentences and sophisticated regulation terminology. Next, AI models can use the data to propose alternatives for policy adjustments based on similar events from the past and to indicate new regulations pertaining to the business. All of these features can save a significant amount of time for an analyst, hence decreasing expenses.

Among the most time-consuming aspects of regulatory reporting is determining what, when, and how must be reported. This necessitates that analysts not only analyze the regulations but also interpret them, compose prose describing how the requirements relate to their organization, and translate it into code to retrieve the appropriate data. Alternately, AI can rapidly read unstructured regulatory data to determine reporting needs, interpret it based on historical regulations and scenarios, and generate code to initiate an automated process that accesses numerous firm resources to make the reports. This approach to regulatory information is gaining hold in the few industries where filings for new product approvals are necessary.

Also Read: Transforming Regulatory Compliance Management with AI

The practice of selling in highly regulated marketplaces necessitates suitable marketing materials. However, the approval process for the constant influx of new marketing materials can be complicated.

Compliance expenses are escalating exponentially, as compliance officers must guarantee that each piece of tailored marketing content is compliant with medicine labels and regulations. AI is currently utilized to scan information and evaluate compliance more rapidly and efficiently, as adding personnel to scale these tactics would result in a considerable cost increase. In some instances, AI bots are employed to edit and compose marketing material that complies with regulations.

Traditional rules-based transaction monitoring systems in Financial Services are susceptible to generating excessive false positives. By incorporating AI into historical transaction monitoring systems, it can minimize false compliance warnings and cut review costs. Those issues judged legitimately high-risk can be escalated to a compliance officer, while others can be resolved automatically. With compliance officers focusing solely on high-risk transactions identified for review, these resources can be redeployed where they would provide more excellent value. AI can also be used to update classic rules engines and monitoring systems as new trends are recognized.

To prevent criminal behavior and money laundering, banks must conduct due diligence on new customers to guarantee they are law-abiding and will stay so throughout the relationship. Background checks can take between two and twenty-four hours, depending on the risk level of a specific individual. Most of this time is spent gathering documents, searching databases, and examining media outlets. Artificial intelligence and automation can streamline this process. Utilizing sentiment analysis, bots can crawl the web for mentions of a client and flag unfavorable information. NLP technology can examine court records for indications of unlawful conduct and the most pertinent media mentions for analysis.

Check Out The NewEnterprisetalk Podcast.For more such updates follow us on Google NewsEnterprisetalk News.

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Strategies for Reducing Compliance Expenses with AI and Automation - EnterpriseTalk

HONOLULU (KHON2) Many businesses were forced to adapt during the pandemic, for many, it was about becoming more efficient, and efficiency is becoming more of a focus as employers will soon need to adjust to the states increase of the minimum wage.

Automation and self-service at businesses boomed during the pandemic. At Noi Thai Cuisine, reservations, orders and payments can be completed by the customers without even interacting with other humans.

Download the free KHON2 app for iOS or Android to stay informed on the latest news

The Noi Thai Cuisine General Manager Tayawadee (Koi) Ford said their online software has made the restaurant work more smoothly.

Its making it easy, we dont have to worry about getting the order wrong on a to-go online, so they order already, Ford said. And not having people stand and pick up a phone call so they can do something else.

While the online software does not immediately cut operational costs, it does help the restaurant better prepare for the day ahead.

Many businesses will be considering their operations moving forward as the minimum wage increase is set to begin on October first.

The states minimum wage will go from $10.10 to $12, and the increase by two dollars every two years until 2028, when the minimum hits $18.

A statement from the Chamber of Commerce Hawaii said,

We appreciate the Legislatures work to pass legislation to increase our minimum wage. As the voice of business in Hawaii, particularly small businesses, the Chamber supported having an increase in minimum wage that more gradually rose over a longer period of time to have less of a negative impact on businesses. The legislative process took its course and we would like to thank the Legislature for balancing all of the needs in our community.

Governor David Ige signed the minimum wage increase on Wednesday, and he said increasing the pay in phases will help businesses adjust to the changes.

Ige said, Having two years between every step up will allow the businesses to be able to incorporate the minimum wage increase as the time progresses, we do know that many employers are already paying above the minimum wage.

Lonohana Estate Chocolate Sales Associate Lea Sado said her pay is more than the minimum wage.

Sado said, They pay their employees livable and ethical wages so it is slightly above the minimum wage which allows us as workers to have one to two part-time jobs rather than multiple at a time.

The shop located at Salt at our Kakaako is just one of many businesses that had to switch things up during the pandemic, going from a walk-in shop to a walk-up.

Check out more news from around Hawaii

Sado said, This gives us an opportunity to interact with customers and also work with them rather than having five people all at once juggling things around.

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Automation, self-service; businesses adapt to the times - KHON2

Medallion founder and CEO Derek Lo.

Medallion had a great first quarter in 2022. The San Francisco, California-based healthtech startup, whose software automates back office operations and compliance, doubled its customer base and revenue in the six months since raising a $30 million Series B, according to founder and CEO Derek Lo. With nearly 200 customers, mostly other digital health startups, the next push is to sign up big incumbents mainly hospitals and health insurers to use Medallions software to cut through these time-consuming bureaucratic hurdles. Looking at a much longer sales cycle ahead coupled with the possibility of an economic downturn, Lo started talking with Medallions existing investors and everyone agreed the best defense is a good offense.

Even though Medallion has barely touched its Series B capital, the company raised a preemptive $35 million Series C co-led by Spark Capital and GV to ensure a more than three-year runway as it looks to scale up its hospital and insurer business regardless of what happens in the broader markets. Salesforce Ventures also joined the round along with existing investors Optum Ventures and Sequoia. The funding brings Medallions post-money valuation to $350 million, up from $200 million in November.

We want to ensure that we have enough capital to grow the way we want to even in a recession, says Lo, 27, who is an alum of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list. Medallion is necessary software that ensures healthcare companies stay in compliance and can more cost effectively manage their clinician network.

Reducing friction and lowering administrative costs are key for many of Medallions customers. The humdrum work of figuring out the unique licensing procedures for doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers in each state, enrolling with insurers and performing background checks for credentialing requires time, manpower and money. In a world where people are looking for places to save money and focus on the things that are really strategic for them, outsourcing this provider network management stuff to a vendor like Medallion makes a ton of sense, says Will Reed, general partner at Spark Capital.

Medallions key sales pitch is reducing what Lo calls time to productivity, which he defines as how long it takes a clinician, either newly hired or an existing clinician, to essentially jump through any necessary credentialing and compliance hurdles before they can start seeing patients. Medallion, which charges fees based on the total number of providers, estimates it has saved its customers around 250,000 hours worth of bureaucratic headaches.

Thats why Equip, a San Diego-based startup that provides virtual specialized treatment for eating disorders, signed on as a customer rather than hiring and training an in-house team to handle these administrative functions. Everyone in healthcare talks about access. And access is great, but what really matters is access to care that works, Erin Parks, cofounder and chief clinical officer of Equip said in a statement. Because Medallion was able to power our growth from 8 to 50 states in less than 6 months, we were able to get back to focusing on treating young people and their families with evidence-based care.

Signing up new digital health customers can take a month or two, says Lo, but the average time to get to contract with a health insurer or hospital is usually six months at the fastest and can take up to 2 years. Medallion has already made some inroads signing on new customers including Longevity Health Plan of Florida, a special Medicare Advantage plan for people living in skilled nursing facilities. The company is also growing its sales team and building out specific workflows for whats known as hospital privileging, a credentialing process specific to health systems. Current employee headcount is around 150, which could grow to 200 by the end of the year.

Having the backing of Salesforce Ventures as a strategic investor is also key to Medallions future aspirations. The San Francisco-based cloud giant already provides customer relationship management and database tools to large healthcare companies, but it doesnt offer niche workflow automation services like credentialing. That creates a cross-sell opportunity, Lo says. We truly want to build a public-scale company, and to do so we're definitely going to need to increase the surface area of the product to be able to better serve health systems and payers, he adds. We think that there's absolutely an ocean to grow in.

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Healthcare Automation Startup Medallion Raises $35 Million To Go On The Offensive - Forbes

According to the Construction Financial Management Association , the average pre-tax net profit for general contractors is between 1.4 and 2.4 percent and for subcontractors between 2.2 to 3.5 percent. With margins this low, there is little room for error, and contractors should absolutely consider utilizing technology and tools to mitigate project risk.

Unfortunately, todays pace of construction moves so quickly that the most commonly available tech resources such as heavy Building Information Modeling and Reality Capture datasets are underutilized due to inaccessibility.

In order to increase the ROI for BIM and Reality Capture programs, the next big focus in construction technology should be on connecting data sets. This will let platforms collaborate and produce automated analysis with less human supervision, allowing teams to focus on other important tasks.

There are two major themes emerging that can immediately assist with connecting data with the tools available today. First, creating a connection between BIM and Reality through continuous updates and synchronization. Second, automating the translation of BIM to Reality will avoid unnecessary discrepancies in the first place and greatly reduce errors.

During the design and coordination phase of most major construction projects, there is a lot of effort put into spatially coordinating BIM elements prior to installation. If everything is installed precisely per the plans, in theory, there should be no issues on site. However, the reality is that adjustments happen in the field all the time - often for good and intentional reasons.

Todays general contractors and subs need a method to seamlessly pivot from reality capture data back to design intent. AR and VR solutions can provide this context by overlaying the design models and reality capture data, but often there is still a heavy component of human QAQC to identify where the issues lie on site.

One of the most common complaints of a VDC manager is that models were coordinated or clash free, but installation errors on site have caused new issues that could not have been prevented through a typical coordination process. A reality capture system is needed that updates the model in near real time to proactively capture as-built conditions and identify downstream impacts. In this way, teams can continuously coordinate their models as conditions onsite inevitably change.

Throughout a buildings life cycle, commercial spaces will undergo major renovations every 5-10 years. Therefore, it is critical that each renovation is properly documented. Although it is a common close-out requirement, As-Built documentation is rarely very accurate. This results in downstream costs and delays for owners who are typically responsible for providing this documentation to consultants at the start of a project.

As owners become more advanced, and regulatory measures require more robust close-out documentation, the As-Built model is becoming a more common requirement. Creating this As-Built model can be a costly and time-consuming task, leading to errors and resulting in delayed final payments. Automating the placement of modeled geometry will drastically reduce the time required to produce quality As-Builts . The resulting model is also much less prone to error due to human oversight.

The reality is that until the translation of BIM to fabrication is automated, there will always be necessary site modifications and installation errors resulting in rework. One solution to this problem is to deploy robots to directly translate design to construction. Robotics in the construction industry is not an entirely new concept, with advancements in manufacturing, prefabrication, and logistics in the last few decades. However, one of the most disruptive advancements in the industry is deploying robotics on construction jobsites tasked with highly repetitive, dangerous, or tedious tasks.

Todays construction robotics capabilities include laying out and even building walls, operating autonomous equipment, using imaging technology to gain valuable insights, and remotely operating equipment to minimize safety risk imposed on staff on the jobsite.

Construction robotics can even be used for surveying, surveillance, and inspection. When partnered with the right applications, these autonomous site capture technologies offer a wide range of benefits, from increased productivity, safety outcomes, and even overall project outcomes.

As the construction market evolves and grows alongside new technological innovations, robots could soon become commonplace on our job sites. This would result in general contractors and developers leaning into the technology and startup space more aggressively through partnerships and pilot programs across portfolios to test new solutions and evaluate outcomes.

Construction Robotics in the field offers considerable advancement in efficiency and safety protocols. Robots perform tedious, repetitive, and dangerous tasks, freeing up site personnel to focus on the bigger picture and keep projects on track. Additionally, utilizing robotics to monitor and record jobsite conditions continuously offers insight into project status, progress, and quality that has never before been available.

The adoption of construction technology across the industry will allow better data management and more opportunity to carry learnings from project to project. By taking steps to connect BIM and Reality Capture, initial investments will be greatly increased.

Read more:

BIM Automation, Reality Capture Analysis is Future of Construction Industry - For Construction Pros