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Staffing is also a challenge for these companies. With operations located in remote areas, it is difficult and costly to attract and retain a talented workforce. This leads to a high degree of staff turnover, which in turn drives up training costs. Moreover, in many disciplines, an aging workforce shrinks the available talent pool even further, and makes the need to leverage expertise more acute.

So, where do these industries go from here? Simply put – operating companies really have no choice but to leverage their human capital in a unified way across their assets in order to succeed in today’s market. Automobile organizations must adopt new thinking in order to Solutions in an increasingly complex and distributed environment.

To enhance operations, it is necessary to connect the production and enterprise levels and ensure the availability of real-time information, not simply data across multiple sites. This, in turn, will enhance decision-making, enabling improved asset performance.

Transformative Business Strategy

The level of business transformation associated with the implementation of a remote collaboration, optimization and operations strategy cannot be achieved by technology investments alone. Rather, this is a large-scale change for companies that goes to the core of their operations. To ensure success, they need to take into account the following key elements (See Fig. 2):

Vision: The overall strategy for a remote initiative must be driven at the highest level of the organization in order to ensure alignment and accountability across business units and functions
People: As personnel and their roles evolve, care needs to be given to the human element and appropriate change management must be adopted. The change must be meaningful and actionable for all involved
Processes: Organizations must have a keen appreciation of roles at the task-level, and re-associate them to work processes, to ensure continuity in operations.

refer to:
http://www.automation.com/business-transformation-through-remote-collaboration-optimization-and-operations

The “maker” movements of the past few years quickly gained traction in the education and hobbyist markets, as organizations began producing open hardware boards with a “less-is-more” architecture at a price to match. DIY boards like the Arduino, BeagleBoard, and Raspberry Pi provide “known state” programming platforms that allow easy exploring for novice developers, and enough flexibility for advanced hackers to create some pretty remarkable things – which they have solutions.

Now, Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com) projects like Ninja Blocks are shipping Internet of Things (IoT) devices based on the BeagleBone (see this article’s lead-in photo), and startup GEEKROO is developing a Mini-ITX carrier board that will turn the Raspberry Pi into the equivalent of a PC. Outside of the low barrier to market entry presented by these low-cost development platforms, maker boards are being implemented in commercial products because their wide I/O expansion capabilities make them applicable for virtually any application, from robotics and industrial control to automotive and home automation systems. As organizations keep enhancing these board architectures, and more hardware vendors enter the DIY market, the viability of maker platforms for professional product development will continue to increase.

 

refer to:
http://embedded-computing.com/articles/diy-pushes-open-hardware-kindergarten-kickstarter/