Automation has become synonymous with productivity and efficiency in today's highly competitive business world. O Cesar Lavalle previously explored the various impacts of this movement on logistics, and the topic will be widely discussed at the 23rd International Supply Chain Forum in September 2017, discussing innovations, robotization and automation in logistics.
One of the crucial points of this topic, however, is that an extremely automated company may not necessarily translate into a company with lower costs and/or higher revenues. For several processes, the human touch combined with the automation of machines is still fundamental to optimize operations: it is called autonomation.
Figure 1 – Highly automated warehouse in the consumer goods industry
Figure 2 – Pick-It-Easy Robot, from the company Knapp
Autonomation is the search for harmony between the agility and speed of machines with human sensitivity. Often processes designed to be automated do not see in advance all the variables that can influence their efficiency, giving rise to the need for human ability to deal with improvisations and imperfect data.
This was the case for example with PayPal and its anti-fraud system. Initially with substantial amounts of transaction fraud losses, the company decided to invest in a highly automated transaction verification system. However, fraudsters always found a way to circumvent the anti-fraud algorithms developed and constantly updated by the company. The solution found was to simplify the algorithm to only flag suspicious transactions and pass them on to human analysts to carry out the investigation more deeply. The results were clearly satisfactory.
Other examples of autonomation more closely linked to manufacturing have occurred since the advent of Toyotism in the 70s. Factories and warehouses full of robots and systems have never dispensed with the human eye to detect abnormalities, interrupt the operation, correct the problem and install an automatic correction for any eventualities. future similar problems. Both in factories and in services, the ability of machines to quickly generate results is analogous to the human ability to improvise and make unscheduled corrections.
And does your company have an optimal level of automation to achieve the best possible results? Hitting the sweet spot between 100% automated and 100% human is critical to any company's strategic goals.
If you are interested in this topic, be sure to participate in the 23th International Supply Chain Forum September 19-21, 2017. See you there.
References:
http://www.scdigest.com/experts/DrWatson_17-05-23.php?cid=12463
https://ilos.com.br/web/transformacao-digital-do-supply-chain/
