What is Automation?
- Automation is the utilisation of computing technology to perform a task in a consistent and (generally) efficient manner.
- Utilising automations has many benefits, such as
saving time, or
reducing danger.
Saving Time
- Computers are much faster than humans at solving many problems, such as:
- Sorting Lists
- Searching for Items
- Solving Mathematical Equations
- Similarly, computers are perfectly consistent, returning the same action for a given input.
- As a result, an automation can be used to repeatedly perform a task in seconds what might take a human hours.
- This cumulatively saved time is then able to be used in other endeavours, or potentially result in more free-time.
Examples of saving time
- Automations may seem like something that only benefit large organisations with lots of menial tasks to perform on loop.
- However, almost everything we do in our day-to-day lives has benefitted from automation.
- Take Google Maps for example.
- Google Maps uses an automation to finding the "best" route from A to B.
- This automation can find such a route in moments, a task which could take you a much longer time to just find A SINGLE route.
- For another example, consider phone calls.
- Years ago, to make a phone call you'd have to dial the phone number then ask someone to physically connect your phone line to that person.
- Nowadays, you only have to press a button or two on your phone and you will be connected to someone else in no time.
- What your phone is doing to connect you with your friend is an automation. One which saves you a lot of time.
Reducing Danger
- Automations present opportunities to reduce the danger in heavy industries
- The primary automation improving safety is robotics, according to
getac
- By performing certain tasks, such as moving components around a warehouse, or putting components into place during manufacturing,
- automations remove humans from potentially dangerous situations, allowing them to perform tasks from a safe distance.