Miller Magazine Issue: 116 August 2019

58 COVER STORY MILLER / AUGUST 2019 system, then there is no difference. You won’t need a veteran who knows exactly how many turns he needs on that knob, or how much to pull on that lever. This is automating the smart, instead of au- tomating the dumb. This where real break- throughs are achieved. It is not that you won’t need highly trained people. In fact, you will need much better peo- ple, but not for the critical routine activities. You will need better electricians, better mechanics, and at least one programmer, to maintain those systems. But they don’t even need to be on payroll. If you are near a large city, you could outsource maintenance to a service company, and pay them by the hour, according to some maintenance plan to be agreed on. Even if you have to put the technicians on payroll, consider that the higher qualified work- ers are less likely to unionize. These are people who are confident they can just quit and find another job if they don’t like something, instead of going on strike. And Union problems in a small to medium sized company, in a third world country, may mean sure bankrupt- cy. As I said in a pre- vious article, you should also consid- er the quality of the technicians available in your area. If you own a flour mill in a remote area of Bra- zil, then you should either offer people very attractive sala- ries to more to your town, or complete- ly forget about au- tomation. I have a client who owns a large facility at just two hours from Mon- tevideo (the country capital of Uruguay) and he can’t find a PLC programmer who will get there in less than one week. Also, the more compo- nents a system has, the more prone it is to fail. Automation also means the process is re- peatable and avoids subjective views. Grain sampling and truck weighing, left completely in the hands of human operators, invite corrup- tion. Of course, these sensitive areas should be audited regularly, but it is better to leave little margin for illegal practices. In consequence, you save a lot of money on labor by automating your processes. However, you also improve the quality of the work. The new in-line sensors provided by major manufacturers can evaluate critical pa- rameters in real time and feed that information to the SCADA, allowing the system to adjust automatically to those changes. That is some- thing that couldn’t be done before, because the time required to take a sample, analyze in