The Commercial Climate

It can be quite a difficult decision to automate. With many variables like manning costs, quality issues, Health and Safety etc. all working towards the succesful justification for CapEx, but engineers may sometimes lose sight of the a business's raison d'etre.

It would be a high risk strategy to try to automate a business out of trouble. A healthy order book is essential for a successful automation project. Ideally growth projections will be available for the next year or two. It would also be preferable for contracts to be in place to reflect projected demand, although this may not always be possible. The heath and constancy of the customer base is also significant.

Stating the obvious, I believe that the major driver behind any automation project will be inability to satisfy customer requirements. If you cannot produce quantity, quality and volume as and when required, your customer will be looking.

Problems can manifest themselves in a number of ways, but any process which represents a bottleneck to workflow through inability to produce sufficient quantity, or inherent process problems, will need to be addressed.

Engineers may sometimes carry out a 'what if' exercise to determine the relative benefits of automation in a specific area but there is no better motivator than the need to automate a problem process to compete and grow the business.