In today’s world, automation and digitalization are a must. Every day, the industry is changing to be more automated and digitized. Automation saves businesses time and money while also increasing productivity. With automation, fewer employees are needed, which means that you have to spend less on labor costs as well as benefits for those employees. Digitalization helps increase your revenue over time by allowing new products or services to be created that would not have been possible before because of automation.
These investments don’t come cheap, but they pay off quickly in the long run with increased profits from automation and digitalization within your company. There are many opportunities out there if you want an automated or digitized business, so take a look at some of them!
Precise Mechanics
Certain industries, such as foundries, the electronic or car industry, have a great need for high precision in certain aspects of their production. A casting robot is a great example of this – making a mold is a laborious process that wastes a lot of material, something that is done much better with a machine with several axes of rotation, and more arms than anyone human have! A robot not only manages to do a complex item quicker but with less waste too.
The car industry is famous for introducing robots in the assembly line to make production faster and simpler (and to keep it that way). Some machines are so complex, they have to be programmed for years before being allowed to work on products, but after that initial investments are extremely profitable.
Even if you only think of automation as a solution for your factory assembly line, you can see how helpful automation can be in any industry – where there is repetition, automation is often the best option. This means more jobs being done by people doing less work that requires skill rather than muscle power or just time spent waiting around.
Digitalization
The other side of automation is digitalization. Digitalization allows people to use computers instead of their own brains to do memory-intensive tasks through software applications designed for exactly those purposes. Calculating the area of a triangle is something that takes even highly intelligent people some time to do, but computers can do it in fractions of a second.
It’s not just math and science tasks that automation can handle for us – we don’t really need to remember all our logins and passwords for different websites and programs, or keep track of what day your car inspection is due – automation through software applications will take care of all this and more, freeing up our brains for other tasks. Tasks that machines are not able to do (yet), like working with people or creating art.
Digitalization also means that instead of making each part individually, you design them digitally beforehand. These designs are then shared between different companies and countries through cloud services and other applications to make sure no one makes a part twice, as they will fit perfectly. The same goes for almost any part of a product that you can imagine – automation and digitalization ensure they are produced as efficiently as possible and with the least amount of interference from humans.
Business is Changing
With automation and digitalization making work easier, doing business has also changed over the years. Because you can create computerized robots with extremely high precision that makes one product faster than several employees working at it by hand used to be able to manage, automation increases the speed at which products are produced. This has created a situation where companies that produce large amounts of products have to compete with each other over being fast enough – making automation an industry-standard, rather than just something for specific industries, within only a few years!
Relying on manual labor alone has become a sort of niche, reserved mostly for “old crafts”, where a human’s touch is wanted, but even those businesses rely on digitalized accounting to do that part of their work. And automation is being used to assist these craftsmen in the physical work as well, further reducing reliance on actually working yourself. A carpenter could make a table with his hands from scratch, from chopping down a tree to sanding down the finished surface, but using electric power tools – the first form of automation is taken as normal even in such an ancient craft.
Cutting on Other Costs
Through automation, many parts that used to be produced by hand using manual labor can now be done automatically with machines, meaning more products can be made by the same people in the same amount of time. Also, an automated machine does not need breaks or lunch, so it can continuously produce at all times. One problem here is, of course, that while some manual workers will not be needed anymore -highly skilled workers that know how to operate the machines need to be employed.
Through automation, businesses decrease their cost per unit while increasing production speed. The more money is needed to make one product, the less of them will be sold (most people only want to buy cheap products) meaning some companies lose out on potential clients while some gain clients – the ones that offer the lowest price. This has been true since the beginning of civilization, that bigger output and lower prices have an advantage, but unlike in the past, today business owners can rely on machines rather than a huge number of employees to achieve this.
It’s not uncommon to hear people say that automation and digitalization will take our jobs. But the truth is, we need automation and digitalization more than ever if we want to create new products and services–and keep up with the rest of the world. The investments in this field are high, but they can pay off over time by bringing in money for every hour your business isn’t open – which means you’re able to work fewer hours at a higher rate because there are fewer employees required. If you’ve been considering automation or other forms of productivity-enhancing technology solutions, now could be just the right time: there may never be another opportunity like it again!
