Published on 11/08/2016 | Use Cases
For many years the automotive industry has been well known for its intensive use of industrial robotics. Since the implantation of the first industrial robots in the 1960s, a lot of things have changed. These days, the production lines need to be more efficient, flexible and precise. Many enhancements have been made on production lines over the last few years to help workers in their daily tasks.
In the nineties, ERP and shared services concepts in the Information Technology (IT) Industry fuelled the emergence and growth of centralized finance and accounting, HR, procurement, and other business functions. Since the turn of the century, offshore labor arbitrage has driven a new round of cost savings by lowering the human costs of performing the associated services. The next wave of cost savings is gathering pace and is increasingly focused on replacing manpower with technology in service delivery.
The robotic revolution has arrived and it looks nothing like we imagined. We’re not talking about futuristic, mechanical robots; we’re talking about intelligent software robots that automate virtually any business and IT activity. It’s a software platform that can interface and interact with applications on behalf of human workers and execute tasks earlier done by IT administrators.
Cloud is increasingly becoming a part of every client’s IT toolkit. As we continue to support both existing IT environment and also new cloud model resources (two speed/ bimodal IT), IT administrators will likely span across on-premises datacenter and resources located in clouds run by third parties. This requires multiple management solutions, beyond our existing investments, to automate and deliver continuous IT services. Robotic Automation enables IT teams to create an intelligent software-based robotic digital workforce to manage this hybrid IT environment overlays seamlessly, help lower the costs associated with repetitive, manual intervention with the systems. It can also create transformative efficiency and productivity gains, drive greater process, and spur superior IT service delivery service. The latest robotic applications in automotive manufacturing and IT industry are as follows:
· Robotic Vision: Leading automotive companies introduced robotic "eyes". The use of robotic technology where laser and camera placed in an array on the robot wrist, is able to see exactly where to install the parts on the car body and quickly sight issues in production. Likewise the robotic vision is driving the upstream IT and Business event automation by the use of advanced analytics & data science to automate IT and business problems. It helps in IT/ business event noise reduction, issue isolation/ correlation, to narrow down and contextualize the “true” IT problems, thereby automating the labor intensive and error-prone legacy manual processes of problem isolation and event filtering.
· Collaborative Robots: Although recent exposure of robotic collaboration mostly concern human-robot collaboration, this case deals with more of a robot-robot collaboration. In fact, in an advanced robotic automotive plant the typical welding line is considered to be one of the most productive robotic lines where robots work at different workstations, collaboration happens between welding robots, handling robots, testing robotics and cleaning robots. Robotics is now used in IT to integrate tools, people and processes through a collaboratively workflow and helps to orchestrate the entire IT and business processes lifecycle. Use of robotics for IT Process Automation helps eliminate labor-intensive manual interactions, providing an intuitive automation platform that automates key processes such as business, system, network and application tasks. Allowing IT administrators to maintain full control over automated tasks, robotic automation frees up time to focus on key issues that improve service levels.
· Robotic Hands: To reduce the weight applied on the human hand, automotive companies have developed a bionic hand or robotic hands. This exoskeleton device helps to reduce the stress produced on human hand by repetitive movement. Although the automotive industry uses a large number of industrial robots in a production line, human workers contribute to the final completion of the cars. The use robotic hands further simplifies and automates the last mile of the human assisted processes. Robotic Hands are used in IT and business processes to automate key operational tasks using “Last Mile Action Handlers(LMAH)” These task based, on-demand automation triggers or handlers help IT administrators to automate activities like issue triage, application or infrastructure sanity checks, status based queries and overall supports faster mean time to repair (MTTR)
· Robotic Testing: Getting the hard/dirty job of all day long quality checks can not only be exhausting for a human worker, but it can also cause injuries and motivation to drop dramatically. The automotive industry tends to use Robotic Testing more frequently automate the full quality management processes to drive high quality products. Robotic automation is used to execute automated pre-scripted tests on a software application before it is released into production and also to drive the wing-to-wing service quality management in DevOps and incident management life-cycle.
Intelligent automation in Information technology is the combination of artificial intelligence and automation—is starting to change the way business is done in nearly every sector of the economy. Intelligent automation systems sense and synthesize vast amounts of information and can automate entire processes or workflows, learning and adapting as they go. Applications range from the routine to the revolutionary: from collecting, analyzing, and making decisions about textual information. It is already helping companies transcend conventional performance tradeoffs to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency and quality.
