Process and control automation predictions for 2024
18/04/2024 Festo Ltd
Swapnil Khedekar, Festo UK Head of Operations
I see some strong prospects for UK automation in 2024, but many external factors could upset a good year. Businesses will need to carve their own path in the face of ongoing uncertainties to create and secure their own future. This involves making the right investments: not just in developing new products but also in terms of people, processes and how we address the market and support our customers.
Market fluctuations
Individual industry sectors have their own cycles that will influence demand for process and control solutions in the coming year. For example, the automotive sector is currently increasing investment as it transitions to electric vehicles (EVs). This may not be entirely good news from an automation perspective however, because assembling an electric powertrain is a far simpler process than building an internal combustion engine.
Uncertainty also surrounds related emerging markets, such as lithium-ion battery production. The network of giga factories envisaged by our government is slow to materialise and production is lower than anticipated. By contrast, China has stepped up capacity significantly and currently dominates global Li-ion battery production, so it has the ability to supply both its own domestic market and meet European demand as well. The USA has responded with massive subsidies through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which is shoring up US domestic battery production and diverting external investment away from Europe toward the USA. These market manoeuvres by China and the US leave UK OEMs with a very small domestic market and limited opportunity to develop the machine building capacity necessary to address the needs of the emerging EV battery sector.
The electronics sector, including semiconductor manufacture, is constantly fluctuating. Fabrication production cycles are extremely long, and the pandemic initiated a demand drop followed by a sharp rise. It took more than twelve months to respond to this increase in demand. This in turn resulted in over-production, which means we are currently experiencing a phase of over-supply and reduced investment. The sector will certainly recover, although it is hard to predict when.
Life sciences was another sector that made a step change during the pandemic. Laboratory automation made enormous strides in fields like sample diagnosis and drug discovery. Thankfully the intense periods of virtual panic buying of equipment during the pandemic have subsided, allowing the sector to stabilise. However, the learning from that time about the benefits of automation has had a permanent and positive effect. There are many opportunities within the life-tech sector for the automated handling and testing of samples with high and verifiable throughput, which make life sciences an exciting development area for the automation sector during 2024 and beyond.
People and skills
The UK automation sector is facing an ongoing loss of experience through retirement and is struggling to attract and retain skilled talent to replace this. Businesses need to redress the balance with a development program linked to longer term succession planning. Recruitment and retention initiatives will need to attract a diverse range of young people through multiple routes such as technical apprenticeships, internships and closer links with academia.
More and more rapid technological developments also mean businesses must take existing employees on their own personal development journeys by up-skilling and cross skilling e.g. mechanical to electrical, electrical to controls and controls to software. At Festo we have managed to align our recruitment and development programs with existing staff retirement plans: meaning for the first time in many years we have a full workforce. It is a dynamic situation, but we have a plan and it is working.
Sustainability
Sustainability in production and end use is becoming critical and we’re likely to see developments in automation aimed at reducing environmental impacts continue during 2024. Better control and monitoring are key. Fortunately, the relative cost of micro-controllers, sensors, displays and software is becoming cheaper, which makes their integration into electric drives and actuators more attractive, Coupled with improved accuracy and repeatability, electric drives offer a genuine alternative where pneumatic drives don’t make financial or environmental sense.
To support this trend, Festo is introducing new ways for the users of our automation equipment to select and operate it in the most efficient way possible. We are using online tools to deliver a higher degree of transparency about the CO2 used in the manufacture of the components that our customers buy and the air they will consume through their operation. These tools are applied during the selection process and through the creation of relevant environmental documentation using digital twins. Integration of the many separate drawings, documents and manuals into a structured, machine-readable package that can be linked to the application will enable application-specific loads, machine cycles and cycle rates to be applied to derive the CO2 consumption, enabling optimised designs throughout the machine’s operational lifetime.
Other business trends
Simplification is a key business driver for 2024. Adding the power of electronics and software to traditional mechanics offers increased flexibility and performance, but it can also bring complexity. We need to reduce complexity for the industrial user – as smart phones have done for consumers. Simplifying the connectivity of so-called smart devices reduces the barriers for inexperienced users and accelerates the deployment of new technologies. Making things simpler is not easy but it has to be our future.
Continuing to adopt open platform technologies is another priority. This delivers foundation products that are lower in cost and can be manufactured in extremely high, but fluctuating volumes. Festo are increasingly offering the ability to add flexibility, closed loop control and communications. Our latest valve terminals are a perfect example. The next step is to add the ability to upgrade the software functionality, for example providing preventative and predictive maintenance either through simple counting and monitoring or with added artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Investing in our infrastructure and facilities is another focus for Festo in the coming year. We want our customers to be aware of and to understand the latest automation technology developments, and how they can apply them to their businesses. Successful automation increasingly involves using the right medium at the right time: for example, we are seeing a new online/offline balance with our website, with our sales and application support visits and in our Didactic training division.
Online or offline?
How much business to conduct online and how much customers still value physical meetings and product demonstrations is an ongoing challenge post-COVID. In 2023 Festo made the big step of investing in, and managing the transition to, a new global enterprise IT system. We now have the latest, globally unified version of SAP, providing a platform to manage our increasing number of global manufacturing and distribution centres. Both environmentally and commercially, we wanted to achieve shorter delivery times by increasing ‘manufacturing in the region, for the region’ whilst having the advantage of accessing multiple production sites to manage demand peaks and reduce supply chain bottlenecks caused by local issues.
Our new website is called FOX, short for Festo Online eXperience, and 2024 will reveal its true potential. It is much more than an online shop window and buying till. FOX can supply designers with the tools to quickly design a system based on the application requirements, to simulate its performance and to supply all the technical documentation, which can be quickly dragged into systems such as EPLAN. The availability of digital twins will become more common, supplying not just the drawings and catalogue data but performance characteristics, and supplying the basis for complete machine life cycle documentation all the way through to re-purposing equipment or providing instructions for recycling.
However, it is also clear that customers still value the physical experience of discussing applications with specialists, seeing the products, and physically handling them. Online consultation is not enough, so we are also continuing to invest in increasing onsite customer visits and increasing our display and application support facilities in Northampton so that customers can come to us. Product application support is still important for getting our customers’ applications up and running faster and with less stress. For replicating applications, we are investing in developing our core engineering capabilities, supporting the project management of complex, multi-disciplinary applications as well as providing the support tools such as rapid prototyping and 3D printing capabilities.
Our training division, Festo Didactic, is also making significant changes following the pandemic. When face-to-face training was impossible, our online learning LX portal came to the fore. Today this is an exciting part of the training mix and the online material will continue to expand and mature in the coming months. It stands alongside the more established physical training rigs and modular production systems for training our own people and our customers.
Conclusion
We cannot prevent uncertainty, but we can plan for it and ensure we make the best of it. Technological developments are accelerating, and we are breaking new ground in the use of artificial intelligence, the roll-out of digital twins and the launch of new pneumatic platform technologies that will power growth for many years to come. We need to ensure we have the right people, trained and motivated to support these exciting developments.
The UK government has issued its plans about improving technical and academic education for 16–18-year-olds with the Advanced British Standard. It has also published its strategy for Advanced Manufacturing and UK battery production – but will today’s ministers be in power to execute them? Personally, I feel these issues are too important for the UK economy to be reliant on political swings and changes. British industry had better continue planning its own path!
Print this articleFor more information, please contact:
Festo Ltd
Applied Automation Centre
Caswell Road
Brackmills
Northampton
Northamptonshire
NN4 7PY
Tel: 0800 626422
Email: info.gb@festo.com
Web: https://www.festo.co.uk
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