Snapshots from the near future: Introduction

A difficult question to answer

At the 2016 Hannover Messe the country featured as a partner was the United States. Which, still under the Democrat Obama Administration sought to collaborate with the EU and specially with Germany in fields like sharing cutting edge technologies to achieve competitiveness and impulse the re-industrialization of the USA to find new intelligent technologies that would enable the US to reach its goals in environment protection and energy efficiency and to acquire knowledge about how to offer educational and training opportunities for company employees in this fast changing, increasingly automated and technologically centered world.

One year later, the world could not be more different. This year’s partner country is Poland, a country with an economy growing twice as fast as the EC average. The new Republican Trump administration is looking for the rebirth of traditional heavy industry in the US, seems to care less for the environment and energy efficiency than ever and doesn’t seem to realize that the vast amount of unemployed or sub employed people in the world is not an effect of shifting industrial production to Asia, but rather an effect of the increasing efficiency of automated production methods as well as a shortage of workers with the required skills.

This dramatic change in the state of things was always in my mind during my recent 3-week long experience of living, learning and working in Germany alongside a group of members from the Autex SA staff.

What we learned about this country, which in my point of view has become a sort of testing ground for the upcoming changes that the rest of the world will be facing in the next years, is the basis for a cycle of articles dealing with topics such as automation trends, the impact of technology in the people, new developments in PROFIBUS and PROFINET technology and how the impact of the IIoT and Industry 4.0 can already be seen over there.

I’d like to give thanks to the firm Indu-Sol GmbH, whose invitation made it possible for our group to live through these extraordinary last 3 weeks.

How did we got there?

Our team had three objectives in mind:

To visit the 2017 edition of the Hannover Messe industrial fair and get an update of the main trends that are shaping the future of Industrial Automation.

To obtain PROFINET certifications (Certified Engineer and Installer) at the Indu-Sol GmbH headquarters, where its PITC/PICC facilities are located.

And finally, to put the acquired knowledge into practice by collaborating with Indu-Sol GmbH field team in some of their customer´s industrial plants.

We accomplished these three goals successfully, but in the way, we also got a taste of how is life and work in Germany. That experience was so moving that I felt obligated to share with my contacts network and to maintain focus, I plan to detail it in a series of consecutive articles.

I kindly invite you to follow this series of articles and share a view into (as an old TV series used to said) 5 minutes into the future.

Mirko Torrez Contreras is a Process Automation consultant who has become as concerned with the future of technology as well as with its consequences on the life of the people that will be affected. He’s currently involved in the development of the first PROFIBUS and PROFINET Training and Competence Center in Argentina.

You can finf the next article in this series following this link.