Art of automation

Art of automation

Choose what to and what not to automate. Analyse and extract the current automation world and predict future problems with automation techniques. 

Current automation world In the modern world, automation plays a vital role in identifying and easing manual work. There has been a tremendous battle to find out the place of automation in every field, be it mechanical, electric and electronics, information technology, medical and biotechnology. Nowadays, people started thinking that automation is an important phenomenon that rules the next-generation technology. Sometimes it is mandatory to automate those areas where human investments became costly as compared with machine investments. Human time is costly The most costly item in this world is human time. Nowadays, many industries started thinking about it and started automating things that merely needs more human time. They even think that investing human time for works that are repeated several times is a waste of money and time as the innovation is potentially void. This thinking is the source of raising the automation concept during the last decade. But still, some areas are unidentified as they are not producing more income for the industry. Why Automation? In today's world, the concept of automation is understood in a different way than anything and everything is to be automated to sell a product. But when we ask a question, Why should we automate a process, then we may get a lot of new answers which is unpredictable. The concept of automation started when we were bored with doing the same tasks repeatedly for a long time. But nowadays, in many industries, consumers are forced to like some automation even though they are not mandatorily automated. For example, in automobiles, a new feature has started coming up in some cars called the Adaptive Driver Assistance System (ADAS), where your car will automatically brake for any huddles in front. By including this feature, the industry has forgotten that the consumers will not break for normal situations in the future and may lead to some accidents if this feature stops working. Hence, we have to ask a question every time before we want to automate something as "Why should I automate this feature"? Art of Automation The art of automation starts by choosing the area that merely requires an improvement where a lot of human efforts are being invested and the outcome is not matching with cumulative human time. There are multiple factors to be considered before we conclude with automation. 1. Benefits calculation Before start thinking to automate a feature, we have to extract the total time invested by humans and the total time saved after this automation. However, we should also consider that what is the loss of automation. For example, imagine that we are automating the driving of a car where autopilot is introduced in every car, then after 10 to 15 years, humans will forget to learn the art of driving and will become very dangerous as it would be a lost technique from us like climbing the tree or swimming. 2. Scope of automation While choosing a feature to automate, we should consider what is the best scope that really needs automation. But nowadays, industries are automating anything and everything as a sellable product. For example, let's take the same concept of autopilot mode in cars. In this case, the main scope was to automate the driving and braking. But actually speaking, we need not automate the driving and breaking completely as it must be a part of us otherwise, we will be a customer inside our car. Instead of automating driving and breaking completely, we can find the scope within driving and breaking, such as finding the distance to the next turn and limiting the vehicle, auto horn to alert the opponents, auto limit the speed of the vehicle as per the guideline, etc. 3. What and what not to automate Often we think that the failure of machines is due to the environment. But we forgot to think that the failure of machines is actually due to the bad architecture of the product, which does not have the failure handling mechanism. In some cases, the failure is due to a lack of test scenarios of the product and lack of test conditions. In modern industry, people are seeing the automation world as magic. They even think that their daily job becomes easy by automating some features. But there is a gap that we forgot actually. When we automate a feature, there must be a portion of the investment for the advancements and next level. But the current industries are refusing this as it will not become sellable in most cases. So we keep working with the same old automation every time even after 10 years. It is very important to decide what not to automate rather than what to automate. Conclusion I know that I have criticised my world of automation. But being in this industry for years, I want to make sure that my future generation should get a benefit out of it and should not suffer. Also, I want to make sure that the automation that we inculcate should not only help us now and should also find a way of improving our future. -- Venkat