New Standards, Technologies and Regulations

Let’s dive right in and first talk a little about the realities of being an automation professional today and the challenges we currently face working with legacy systems. Trying to navigate a path forward to meet business objectives and maintain a competitive edge is increasingly becoming more difficult. According to the ARC Advisory Group, $65 billion dollars’ worth of world automation is reaching end of life and $12 billion of it is at least 25 years old.

A recent Plant Engineering maintenance survey found that 44% of respondents said their leading cause of downtime was aging equipment – but less than half of those respondents are actually using predictive maintenance analytical tools. 

Recently, ARC indicated they believe downtime actually cost the process industry close to a trillion dollars a year. Think about that – a trillion dollars! All caused by downtime. That same survey from Plant Engineering also states the second highest cause of outages as operator error.

Many of you are probably aware that about 20% of our automation workforce is set to retire within the next five years – but maybe not as well-known is that the retention rate of millennials only averages between 30 to 50%. Operator error rates will only increase as the experience level of our operator workforce drops.

So, if that isn’t bad enough, Kaspersky indicated 59% of companies experienced an industrial control system security incident in 2019 and around 70% of companies surveyed consider an attack on their OT/ICS infrastructure likely. 

So, while we’re navigating this minefield of legacy system issues, we’re also getting hit with questions about asset utilization, data visualization, new standards, IT/OT convergence and others. These questions make us realize it’s difficult to fulfill new technological requests because our outdated systems aren’t able to accommodate those requests. 

The point is, your job is really hard and maybe you’re considering migrating, but that’s probably a scary thought. Your operators have been using the current automation system for years, maybe decades and change may be hard for them. And what about you? You’re probably too overwhelmed with keeping production going day after day to even have time to figure out where to even start. Migration often represents a once in a generation level of change for you and your team, so it’s no wonder it might be a bit overwhelming.