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The benefits of industrial automation

Industrial automation is the use of machines, information technologies and control systems to complete and optimize manufacturing of good and delivery of services. Industry automation plays a significant role the world economy. Automation is something beyond mechanization. While mechanisation is providing machineries to human operators to assist them mostly in tasks that have muscular requirements, automation attempts to decrease human labour altogether, by replacing humans with machines.

Now we will look at the advantages of industrial automation:

• Increased productivity- The main motive behind automation is to increase productivity, while maintaining the quality. Automations like robotic machines help a company to achieve greater efficiency and repeatability.

• Improved quality- In industrial automation, the processes can be carefully controlled and regulated so that the quality at the end is not only retained but sometimes also vastly improved.

• Helps maintain competitive edge- Industrial automation, helping industries to improve quality, decrease cycle time and save big, enables companies to maintain the competitive edge and even move ahead of their competitors.

• Significant savings- By employing machineries, a company can save on workforce costs, along with their health care costs, pension coverage, paid days off, and other costly employee benefits. Though the initial investment on the costly robotic machineries can be great, it helps the company save on the monthly wages of production workers. In the long run it ends up to incredible savings of the company. Even if machinery breaks down, the company has to hire a couple of maintenance engineers and get them repaired. Industrial automation also minimizes the creation of waste products and materials. Even if companies employ workers in varying shifts, there need to be off days, like weekends and national holidays that halt the production. On the other hand, machineries can work for 24 hours, 7 days a week. This fact alone increases productivity and leads to significant saving of the company.

• Better safety- By replacing humans by machineries, industrial automation removes them from enduring extreme and even life- threatening work conditions. In this way the company does not have to bear costly insurance claims.

• Performing beyond human capability- In manufacturing processes, there are tasks that are beyond human capabilities, like handling too heavy or large objects, too hot or cold substances, etc. Machineries make these things possible.

Nowadays, industrial automation is mostly done by robots. The industrial robots work on the technology of machine vision that has a sensor for sensing vision data. The machine vision system has 3 important functions:

• Sensing and digitizing image data,
• Image analysis and processing,
• Application.

Automated machinery is a boon for large businesses that produce massive quantities of products. Articulated robots can prove especially beneficial in packaging products and loading them on pallets for shipping. Smaller businesses also benefit from the robotic technology which they can adopt for completing specific tasks that are too difficult or tedious for humans.

Presently the industrial automation industry is very popular. But it can never completely eliminate the need of human assistance. Many tasks performed by humans are beyond the scope of automation, like pattern recognition, language comprehension and production, synthesis of sensory data like sounds and scents, etc.

Tom is a renowned author. He has written many articles on industries and their ways to progress. This article is about industrial automation where she advocates the use of industrial automation for the benefit of a company.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Brown .