Advances in technology are accelerating fast, and on many fronts. A consequence in the process control space is the shift that plant owners are starting to experience in the makeup and skills requirements of the modern factory operator. The tradition of experience – the tricks of the trade – being handed down from one generation to the next, may no longer be sufficient to keep pace with what has become known among HR practitioners as ‘skills churn’.
While the needs of the manufacturing industry are changing as operations technology (OT) converges with information technology (IT), the essence of Industrie 4.0, our education and training systems have remained largely static in their approach. In isolation this is not necessarily a bad thing, as we would probably all agree that the laws of physics, chemistry and electrodynamics will continue to be the bedrock on which the competence of future generations of engineers and technicians is built. After all, pumps will still be driven by electric motors, and valves will still be used to control the flow of liquids or gases in pipes, all monitored by instruments similar to those that currently provide the feedback signals to our control systems.
The snag is that this approach does not easily accommodate the IT component of the IT/OT convergence. Until this problem is addressed, the full power of the next generation metrics that modern analytic algorithms can provide will remain largely underexploited, particularly in critical operation areas such as reliability-centred maintenance and supply chain optimisation. Actually it isn’t quite as bad as all that, we are already doing a pretty good job of digitalisation in areas like MES systems, it’s just that we cannot take these benefits much beyond MES until we equip our future chemical, electrical and mechanical engineers with the digital expertise they require to run the process control technologies of Industrie 4.0 at their full potential. (Remember that even today much of the benefit of a smart instrument is lost simply because the diagnostic data is never accessed. How can it be if the instrument is still set up in a 4-20 mA configuration?)
It is not a question of trying to transform a plant engineer into a computer scientist or data mining expert, but rather, whether a more specialised type of automation engineer is needed to cope with the demands of the new technologies of Industrie 4.0. At the moment, many, often chemical engineers, fall into an automation career in the oil and gas industry (for instance) almost by accident. And they cope rather well, it must be said.
However, and with the fourth industrial era still only in its infancy, the limitations of this approach are already beginning to show. The challenge is not as acute for those vendors and system integrators who adopted early and embraced the principles of Industrie 4.0 within their own organisations, but it is the end users of technology, the manufacturers, who now have the most to lose (or gain). It is also only the end users who have the power to break the current impasse: without strong demands from industry, nothing will change in terms of the way we develop the skill set of our future engineering generations.
At the moment, industry seems to be adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach. Behind the scenes though, there is a growing realisation that if digitalisation does deliver on its promises to manufacturing, then the early adopters will be off to a flying start, leaving the rest wondering how they can ever catch up. The jury is still out on this one, but at this year’s Arc Industry Forum there was some intense discussion around labour availability and skills requirements in manufacturing over the coming years. For more, see Mark Sen Gupta’s article ‘Future of process control staffing’.
Closer to home, you may want to catch the panel discussion at the Connected Industries Conference: ‘The Importance of Education within the Fourth Industrial Revolution’. Moderated by Endress+Hauser MD and SAIMC vice president Rob Mackenzie, it promises some lively debate in what looks like a powerhouse conference line-up at The Dome from 6-8 June.
Steven Meyer
Editor: SA Instrumentation & Control
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