Becoming Proactive in the Automation Maturity Journey

Posted: June 09, 2021

New products and services in the industrial automation space can assist organizations with their digital transformation progress. However, as companies adopt operational and business process efficiency enhancements, it can be all too easy to lose sight of what is best for your unique organization.

To prepare the most effective digital transformation plan for your company, it is critical to understand your organization’s current automation maturity level. Having this basis helps guide the best steps to take toward improvement, and you can find out where you stand by taking a complimentary Automation Maturity Assessment:

In case you missed it, you can review some benefits of digital transformation in our automation maturity  introduction here.

The Leap from Informed Decision-Making to Automated Decision-Making

Is your organization using data from multiple systems across your facilities to make impactful real-time decisions, but struggling to automate the decision-making process? Are you utilizing corporate ERP and business systems, but unable to integrate the data with automated workflows? If the answer to either of these questions is “yes”, your company is likely at the ‘proactive’ level.

Your organization is highly advanced in most areas, and activities probably feel smooth. Your teams utilize effective knowledge sharing, empowering staff to assess issues with a high degree of context to prescribe informed solutions.

When it comes to automation systems, your users are presented with thorough diagnostic information, providing the ability to self-service many operational issues that arise without the need to escalate to outside parties. Additionally, your organizational workflows calculate risk and consider cost/benefit analysis when making business decisions. These tools help minimize downtime and associated profit losses, and they aid your staff in staying productive and on top of operational goals.

Though you have widely-available methods in place to ensure educated decision-making, you can take your processes to the next level by integrating automated decision-making capabilities into operational and business procedures. By incorporating automatic adjustments to workflows, your organization can join the cutting edge in efficiency optimization, aligning real-time operational information with employee activities and business goals.

By automating business process and operational adjustments, personnel can redirect efforts from mundane tasks to efficiency-driven activities for continual operations and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) improvement. Industrial organizations can utilize automated decision-making and machine learning to handle rejects, generate work orders, and manage supply chains. Complex and crucial decisions incorporate authorization workflows integrated directly with business systems.

Automated Benefits

By automating decision-making in a fully-integrated operations and business process database, your organization can benefit from the following elements:

• ·Consistent understanding of operations-business connection from plant floor to corporate leadership.
• Comprehensive business integration.
• Real-time resource allocation & planning.
• Global data-driven operations.
• Improved manufacturing agility.

AVEVA is empowering users to unlock these benefits and more within its Operations portfolio.

Each organization undertakes automation maturity in a unique manner, progressing through the stages at a varied pace. The goal is not a destination at which to arrive, but a path along which to advance. For your organization to experience the greatest benefit from automation maturity and digital transformation, it is critical to frequently review where you stand and strategize the next steps to take.

Even at the ‘proactive’ level, there are always areas for improvement in operations and business processes and identifying and acting on these opportunities can pay dividends for organizational health, sustainability, profitability, and longevity.