Slightly Sensible - B&B Insider

Butterflies, Automation and the New Engineer

  

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Have you felt it yet? The butterfly effect from the major events around our little globe?

It’s been quite a month on this flat planet of ours. We’ve got a new Egypt and a new Libya coming soon. Change on that scale makes our own little trials and tribulations pale in comparison.

Spin your globe to the East to Japan’s horrifying earthquake. Keep walking your fingers around to the US where we’ve declared the end of the great recession, but with little impact on employment – something that may not fully recover until we make a big shift - more on that in a bit.

Zoom in to my little briar patch, where my Wisconsin neighbors to the north just made one of the most symbolic changes in government we’ve seen in awhile, pushing power down to local governments to manage their own education systems.

We’ll leave Charlie Sheen out of the picture.

What’s this have to do with you and me? And what the heck does it have to do with Ethernet, Wireless, USB or Serial data comm? Read on – I’m getting there.

(Don’t worry, no political rant today and you won’t find a single voodoo doll at my desk – not even a sock monkey).

Nobody likes political unrest. Not politicians, not businesses, not financial investors and certainly not the direct victims. Your 401k takes a whack, your fuel prices are up – and their lives are upside down.

And that Earthquake in Japan? Beyond the loss of life, if automotive, consumer electronics or electronic parts touch your life in a significant way you’re about to feel those butterfly wings flapping. That compact country is the 4th biggest export and import economy on the planet. Here at B&B, where our electronic assembly lines hum three shifts per day there was scrambling just hours after the first reports.

I’m skipping over Wisconsin – we’re not touching that topic without beverages.

But let’s talk economy. The power and will of people like you and I are driving us out of the recession, but what’s up with jobs? Slow job recovery is par for the course but take a harder look at what you’ve been through over the last couple years. I’ll bet you a cheese stick that every one of you have taken meaningful and effective action to improve your companies productivity to all time highs (no bet if you’re in the public sector - I’m no sucker). If I’m wrong - be wary because that means you have a competitor that’s about to eat your lunch.

How did it happen?

Necessity breeds innovation. You’ve chewed the fat off of processes, added automation where you never even considered it before and you did it creatively, on a shoestring budget. Every project and process more wisely managed and measured than ever before.

Now that things are turning around, you no longer need as many resources. Less labor, less engineering, less admin. This isn’t the easy “blame China” game. This is the result of innovation and creativity.

Automation drives demand for certain product categories that dramatically outpaces the rest of the economy. You probably see it in your craft, here at B&B I certainly do. Machine and process data is the soul of automation intelligence. More sensors, more connectivity, more integration of existing data ports, more instrumentation – all of that data flowing to create the kind of intelligence needed to improve productivity and quality of manufacturing. At B&B our production lines are humming building lots more Ethernet connectivity products. Heaps of wireless. USB conversion and isolation. Even the communications workhorse of the last 3 decades, RS-485, is growing in numbers.

A few related plugs, then to my point about employment.

First the automation workhorse - these isolated, uber-rugged 232 to 485 converters are absolute customer favorites and rock solid reliable. If you’ve got any equipment that you need to convert between RS-485 and RS-232 these converters won’t let you down.

What do you do when you’ve got a hard to reach serial port or sensor that’s just too expensive to drag a cable to? We’ve put together three Zlinx Xtreme wireless solution kits that give you everything you need to avoid buying cable. Doesn’t matter if it’s serial, sensor, or even part of a Modbus system. Easy peasy.

Your site is wired with Cat5. You’ve got Ethernet everywhere but your equipment has got RS-232, 485, or 422 ports. Sure would be nice if you could connect them to that Ethernet network, wouldn’t it? Whether you think of them as serial to Ethernet converters or the uppity title of serial device servers, they work the same either way – we’ve plenty to choose from.

Ok – what about jobs. This paradigm shift has been in process for over 10 years but the recession accelerated the transition. This isn’t our first rodeo. We used to be hunters, then farmers. Then we industrialized and we became builders of products. Then we transitioned to “knowledge workers,” driven first by low cost labor absorbing manufacturing but today driven by automation.

(Pause for a bit think about the exponentially accelerating timeline of that progression).

The “knowledge worker” of the (near) future has to change or wither on the vine. There are only so many high paying service sector jobs and we can’t all work for government.

What are the jobs of the future? It’s a new breed of engineer. Solid foundation in the fundamentals, but uber-connected. Able to leverage the collective knowledge and wisdom of communities of hundreds and thousands of experts through an ecosystem of meaningful social networking (and I’m not talking Facebook). Creativity and innovation were always a component of engineering but now they’re the cornerstone. Near limitless access to knowledge devalues the concept of being the “technical expert.” If you want a future engineering job, for yourself or your progeny, develop the skills, leverage the collective body of work and global resources and transform them into a needed or desired product or service.

Butterfly wings are flapping everywhere. It appears to me that there are two vital questions:

First, are you ready for the journey? And second, will you be sitting in the back seat or up front, gripping the wheel, right foot hard on the floor?

What are your thoughts on this change in our paradigm? Talk back below.