As Baby Boomers retire, the automation and manufacturing industries are losing critical experience. While technological innovations have helped improve productivity and decrease dependence on manual labor, they have also tended to make processes and job functions in the industry more complex. The industry, therefore, must develop strategies to develop and prepare the younger workforce to fill the impending vacuum in the workforce. This was among the key topics discussed at the 2016 ARC World Industry Forum in Orlando.

Avangrid Renewables is a subsidiary of AVANGRID, Inc., and part of the IBERDROLA Group. Spain-based Iberdrola S.A. is the largest wind energy company in the world. As ARC Advisory Group recently learned, the company collects a wide variety of data from many different sources. However, in the past it faced challenges when it came to gaining useful insight from these data. Particularly problematic, was the difficulty determining and documenting lost generation across its wind turbine fleet time due to voluntary generation curtailment to meet contractual obligations.

ARC Advisory Group often hears questions about how operator effectiveness helps the manufacturing enterprise. The answer is very basic: operator effectiveness is very important as the responsibility for safety, production, product quality, and protecting company production assets lies in the hands of the operator. Operations supervisors, managers, process engineers, maintenance, and control system engineers support the operator, but in most organizations, usually only the operator is responsible for all standard operating procedures (SOP).

Executive Overview

Executive Overview
In retrospect, 2015 was not a good year for global automation markets. Based on ARC Advisory Group's ongoing Automation Index, the overall automation markets in all regions contracted. The main drivers have been the downturn in oil prices, overcapacities in many process industries, geopolitical struggle, the relative downturn in China, and exchange rate effects due to the strong US dollar.

Nevertheless, ARC sees positive signs, particularly for discrete automation, which developed comparatively well.

This ARC Insight is taken from an address to the combined Business Security, Information and Communication groups of the International Business Congress (IBC) on April 8, 2016 by ARC Research Director Harry Forbes.

Market demand for remote monitoring of automation systems continues to increase as revenue pressures and even demographics force end users to seek new ways to address costs.

Some end users have concluded that since they are not in the automation business, they may be best served by entities whose business is automation to monitor their automation systems. This is analogous to the way an individual may delegate auto diagnosis and repairs to a professional mechanic, rather than attempting to do these specialized tasks them-selves.

Those who contribute to the design, implementation and operation of automation strategies have seen their roles changing in the face of new and expanded expectations in areas such as process safety and cybersecurity. The lines between traditional roles such as automation engineer, safety engineer, and cybersecurity expert are blurring.

Although operations and maintenance activities typically generate vast quantities of data – both structured and unstructured – operations and maintenance groups can usually only leverage a small percentage of these data to make better decisions. Most operational data from systems are stored within a process historian archive, or not at all. This represents a challenge to users who need the data to predict and respond to operating conditions or poorly performing assets.

While justifying an automation system upgrade is never easy, it's also not an insurmountable task. At ARC Advisory Group's recent Industry Forum in Orlando, Solvay Chemical gave a presentation on the company's recent Green River Wyoming site DCS upgrade. This project involved an upgrade from a 1998-vintage Yokogawa Centum DCS to that company's latest Centum VP/R5 automation system.