Your business faces increasing automation challenges, but these changes can also bring opportunities.

John Whaley, TEC Systems Group’s Vice President of Business Development, offers his insight into the state of systems automation and how having a partner like TEC Systems Group can help your company.

Leverage automation to enhance capacities and capabilities while improving quality, productivity, and efficiency. Those efforts will continue – and likely accelerate – in 2024. 

Cyber Security 

Your business needs high levels of data security as incidents of cybercrime continue to rise and evolve. 

John says businesses generally do well at taking steps to protect their computer networks. However, leadership often doesn’t recognize the potential vulnerabilities and risks associated with their plant floor network’s integration of operating technology and automated control systems. 

“It has been overlooked, and that’s becoming a major concern,” John says. 

He sees opportunities in the coming year for TEC Systems Group to play a larger role in helping your company reduce the risk of a cyberattack compromising your operational technology.

Be proactive in protecting your business against cybercrime, turn to TEC Systems Group when assessing potential risks. We’ll partner with you to devise comprehensive defense strategies to ensure your networks are safe. You should also consider robust employee training programs to further enhance these efforts. 

Legacy Equipment and Systems

Another area of opportunity in 2024 is to find ways to modernize what John describes as “legacy systems.” He says TEC Systems Group works with businesses to modernize and further automate systems that are aging and have become obsolete in some instances. 

John says modernizing older systems presents new opportunities to engineer solutions and equipment that are better able to capture and store data. Your business then incorporates analytics to keep systems operating at peak efficiency and productivity. 

“We can breathe new life into equipment,” John says. 

Your businesses can ward off machine downtime as much as possible through predictive analytics. John says incorporating data and analytics can pinpoint problems that do arise so equipment and systems can be brought back online quicker. 

Moving more toward smart automation also helps give companies more insight into their cost per unit of parts or other manufactured products. System inefficiencies are better identified as well. 

John says TEC Systems Group wants to help customers understand where their systems are respective to the lifecycle of the equipment and tailor strategies to meet the needs of their particular organization. 

Doing more to educate customers about the benefits of incorporating new technological capabilities will be another point of emphasis in the new year. “Often, it’s using more smart components to make systems run better,” John says. 

Broader Trends 

In a more general sense, advances in technology will continue to drive systems innovation. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data automation are emerging trends in automation to help your business optimize operations, predict trends, and improve decision-making. 

Edge computing is another area of emphasis as automated systems continue to evolve. When your business incorporates edge computing, you will improve your data-automation efforts and reduce latency. The goal of edge computing is to bring data storage and computation closer to data sources. 

Ready to partner with us for trusted custom automation solutions? Maximize your quality, productivity, and efficiency today. 

Engineer confidence now. 

Contact Us