Thoughts

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is building new capabilities in manufacturing

Words "Digital" and "Artificial Intelligence" have become very popular in the industry today. Every organization is moving towards same. Digital solutions comprise of Industrial Automation, Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence. These concepts existed many decades ago. Then what has really changed and why organizations are doing it now?  Evolution of these technologies dates back in the history: Industry Automation (IA) with control systems started as early as 1920 - early 1930. With factory electrification, control systems were built using conventional relay logic where on-off actions can be taken based on set desired values. Numeric Control (NC) machines started during 1950 and subsequently Computerized Numeric Control (CNC) machines evolved. First computing machine dates back to 17th century when the first calculating machine was developed by Blaise Pascal. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace worked on development of analytical engine with pun...

The concept of IoT is catching up fast though it may take some time to speed up its adoption in industries. If it can show real value in short time span, industry will adopt it fast. The apprehension with most industries is the infrastructure which they already have and how to match it with new technologies, which is slowing down its adoption to large extent.   However, the concept existed for years and it was there in isolation in some other form in the name of machine automation or operational technologies. What really changed is introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the machines expected to send data to some centralised location for processing along-with other machine data, which will help in decision making or decision automation. But with embedded technologies gaining prominence and improvement in chipset development and manufacturing, the trend is more towards development of intelligent sensors and devices. That means device will coll...

With companies moving from being national to multi-national and now becoming global organizations, it has become imperative to adopt to global ways of working. Employees and teams spread across the globe managing functions across the World is truly a global way of working. Preconceived notions of management to have all people located in single location or some identified location hubs are waning out. More and more organizations are adopting to policies as work from home or flexi timings to support employees adopting the global way of working. Development of collaboration technologies supported by communication technologies are paving the path to take this movement forward. But the question is, will the offices exist 10 years down the line or will it become virtual offices giving birth to development of new technologies and new business ventures for many? If we look back 100 years from now, let us understand why the concept of people going to offices started. We are leaving out f...

The Wikipedia definition of benchmarking says,  Benchmarking  is the process of comparing one's business processes and  performance metrics  to industry bests or  best practices  from other industries. Almost all organisations do it today for existence in this competitive world. It is necessary to know what is achieved by others, how it is achieved, compare it with yourself and keep continuously improving. Though performance metrics benchmarking can be directly compared, it is important to note that through this method of comparative what is it we are trying to change as part of improvement in the name of benchmarking, especially if it is related to process or policy benchmarking. We should remember what works well for one organisation may not work well with another if we simply try to copy. In some cases it is observed in the name of benchmarking it touches some policies or core values...

Machine Intelligence

The Ant Internet   - Interesting article