It’s the beginning of a year. Always a time for looking back in order to look forward.
December was the 20th Anniversary of my blog. It has changed a few times and is about to change a little again. It went from experiment to novelty to business.
I have experienced several market changes throughout my career. I saw the recreation vehicle market boom and bust (it has made a comeback over the past several years, though). I lived through a PC boom and bust. Then IT. Automation has not had a “bust” but it is at the tail of market change. All witnessed surge in creativity. Many new and truly innovative products—all of which were absorbed by the larger fish in the pond. Then considerable market consolidation with concurrent reduction in competition. Mostly if you are using Dell or HPE or Emerson or Siemens or Rockwell and so on that’s what you’ll use. Switching suppliers is too much of a pain point.
But let us take a closer look at the manufacturing / industrial market. Despite the consolidation of both automation and instrumentation companies along with the move to “digitalization”, we are still solving the same problems I tackled as a rookie in the 70s.
- Reduce cost of materials
- Digitize bill of materials, costs, inventory to improve accuracy and control
- Reduce cycle times
- Reduce inventory
Later we added the use of technology to solve
- Consistent quality
- Reduce cycle times
- Improve uptime
- Decrease unplanned downtime
- Improve project delivery
- Improve safety
But no matter what we called it, we are still solving some basic problems such as how to make the operations more profitable.
Wherever you are, what big problems are you solving?
Gary