11 September 2008

Automation knowledge reservoirs: People

By Jim Pinto

Products are becoming commodities in the fast-moving new global business environment. To succeed, businesses need a competitive differentiator—a proprietary edge only developed through innovation, knowledge, and experience.

For several decades now, the assumption has always been the U.S. and other industrialized nations will keep leading in knowledge-intensive industries while under-developed and developing countries focus on lower skills and lower labor costs. That has now changed. Countries around the world now compete with low wages and high tech.

Clearly, the knowledge base that was once the advantage in the U.S. and Europe is being lost. In many large end-user companies, many long-term process experts and instrumentation engineers with deep and intimate knowledge of key equipment and processes have been eliminated. The proprietary edge is frittered away, a casualty of short-term financial thinking.

Think on this: Quality, price, and availability are all becoming commodities in the fast-moving new global business environment. To succeed, you need a competitive differentiator—the proprietary edge. And this cannot come through short-term “consultants.” It can only be developed by consistent, long-term investments in people. It requires sustained development budgets for automated processes and plant equipment, which requires strong and committed in-house engineering talent.

For the vast majority of companies, knowledge and innovation includes ideas or methods that generate major cost or value shifts. To progress, companies need not just new product developments, but steady improvements in manufacturing and production, marketing and sales channels, and delivery logistics—anywhere within the enterprise where value is added.

Your company’s value resides in its reservoirs of knowledge, its good people.

Related links:

• People Power – Workforce development, aging Boomers:
  http://www.isa.org/intech/20080101/
• Automation Skills Shortage:
  http://r.listpilot.net/c/isa/2o6tbfr/1h142
• Regain competitive edge, invest in people:
  http://www.isa.org/intechnews.cfm?id=4216

Behind the byline

Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and founder of Action Instruments. You can e-mail him at jim@jimpinto.com or view his writings at www.JimPinto.com. Read the Table of Contents of his book, Pinto’s Points, at www.jimpinto.com/writings/points.html.