Automation is by no means a new concept, but it is getting a lot of attention these days. Let’s take a look at the practical application of automation within the workplace.
What is workplace automation?
Workplace automation is the process of creating systems that complete a given task with minimal (or no) direct involvement from humans.
A technical distinction: automating many tasks as part of a process or workflow becomes orchestration.
History of automation
Automation isn’t new. In many ways, workplace automation began during the time of the Industrial Revolution. Then, the advent of assembly lines sought to reduce the skills and knowledge each worker would need in order to create the end product.
The assembly line setup made it so workers could quickly train to accomplish a small set of tasks that made up one small portion of the entire manufacturing process for any given product. The go-to example is automobiles. (Oldsmobile actually used the assembly line for automobile first, before Henry Ford and the Model T of the 1910s truly revolutionized the concept.) This made it possible to:
- Ramp up production speeds
- Drastically reduce the cost of finding new workers
Of course, you could argue that this doesn’t fit our definition of workplace automation. It doesn’t reduce direct human involvement; it just spreads that involvement out among more workers. However, the assembly line approach paved the way for what is possibly the first true form of automation: conveyor belts.
Conveyor belts directly reduced human involvement. We humans no longer had to carry the product from one stage of production to the next. As time pressed onward, human workers would progressively have work offloaded from them through the creation of advanced robotics that could perform tasks previously accomplished by the human workers.
Today, we’re in the fourth industrial revolution. Workplace automation primarily takes the form of software automation through the application of modern technologies like:
