Miller Magazine Issue: 116 August 2019

57 COVER STORY MILLER / AUGUST 2019 Generally, automation is considered some- thing you do to simple tasks, to the most rou- tine and stupid tasks you could find. Makes sense to find those things that are repetitive and simple, and install some gadget to accom- plish them. However, it is essential to remember that we deal with human factors. We get tired, our minds wander, we make silly mistakes. Even making decisions, the most basic human task, can be difficult. Some people will avoid responsibility at all costs. There we find a market for automation. The whole operation of a grain mill can be automated if we take the time to design the process that each grain should go through. In our central system, we have the flow sheets for each grain and for each recipe. They might be hundreds, but once they are in the system, it is just a matter of choosing one. The critical human intervention here becomes the closing of the control loop, by entering the pa- rameters of the raw material and those of the final product. All of which are obtained by lab analysis. If we did an Ishikawa analysis of the grain industry, we would see that most of the prob- lems in production are a consequence of hu- man factors. The root cause might be either lack of training or a complete absence of methods. Or it could be the poor quality of the available workers, but analyzing that and its solutions would take us down a completely different route. Automation is good because it almost erases the need for training and it also forces us to de- velop methods. You can’t automate something that doesn’t have a method. And you don’t need to train something that is just plugged in your system. Think of the time it took to train a human bank teller. And not only that, but also the time it took him to be as proficient as his colleagues. My wife used to work as a teller at a Casino, before becoming a school teacher, and it is always amazing to watch her count money. It is like a superpower. Work at a mill might not be so fast-paced as paying prizes at a Casino, and tasks are rougher in nature, but the difference in abilities between a novice and a veteran should be astounding too. But if the human work becomes simply entering the val- ues from the lab into the recipe of the SCADA