Emerson’s Jonas Berge has a library of LinkedIn articles that are well worth an automation professional’s time to visit and read. To give you a flavor, here are the titles of his five most recent articles:

• Automation Intensity – How to Elevate Your Plant’s Level
• Prescriptive – Centralized Equipment Condition Monitoring
• Prioritize Automation Technology & Talent
• The New Automation: Industrial AI
• Wireless Automation for Safety

As you can tell from the titles, his topics are wide-ranging, and he explores automation technologies and how manufacturers and producers interact with these technologies. I’ll highlight a few points from Jonas’ Automation Intensity article and invite you to follow or connect with him.

Jonas opens by summarizing the article with the key points he’ll make in the article.

• Plants have amazing control systems, but you still see lots of manual activity in the field
• By increasing the plant automation intensity fewer manual tasks are required
• The recommendation is to deploy a second layer of automation, for a higher degree of automation
• The result of more automation is greater productivity and a new level of operational excellence

He describes the concept of automation intensity.

Plants have sophisticated process control systems. So why are there so many persons still working in the field? Well, when you look at all duties around the plant, beyond the production of product, the degree of automation is not as high as we’d like to think it is. The automation intensity is relatively low. This impacts the plant’s ability to achieve higher operational excellence targets. To solve this we must look to the expanded role of automation going beyond the P&ID with a second layer of automation.

Further:

We could think of an automation intensity metric as a percentage of tasks which are automated as opposed to done manually. Hard to calculate – what data would you base it on? But 0% would mean everything is done manually. 100% means it’s completely automatic, autonomous. We want to get closer to 100%, fully automatic. Indeed even when a function is supervised remotely by a human (manually) from a center of operations, such that the site itself is unmanned, that is considered an autonomous site.

Jonas believes that companies should look to drive automation intensity higher, especially as new technologies like practical industrial AI apps and open protocol valve remote control methods have emerged. The control system is focused on controlling the process. But:

…there are many other functions with tasks which is not done by the control system, or any other system, and which therefore are very manual. This includes functions like occupational safety, health, and environment management, sustainability and energy management, reliability, maintenance, and integrity management, and quality management. So even though the core process control is highly automated – has a high degree of automation – which is usually the case in a continuous process plant, the other tasks have many manual elements, such as data collection, data interpretation, and setting valves – zero automation. Thus, overall the plant has a low degree of automation – the automation intensity for the plant is low.

Check out the rest of the article as he describes higher automation intensity, ways to increase the intensity, and putting together an action plan to drive automation intensity projects forward.