Peter Terwiesch, President of Process Automation at ABB @ ARC Industry Forum 2016

Thank you, Andy.

Yeah, we see at least one factor that I mentioned: we talked of the Internet of Things, Services, and People, and I'm really convinced that yes, there's increasingly more things that are connected. ABB is producing a million products a day, and we know already if you look at the world today, we're soon approaching the point where there will be as many connected things as there will be people on the planet. So the things are clearly important. At the same time, the services between things and things, things and services, and people and people are very important. But really the key differentiator for us is the people. If you look at just two of the steps we've taken in this space: the YuMi collaborative robot is actually a robot that can work in discrete automation without the defenses that normally separate people from robots, so really the people and the things getting together more closely. And also if you look at the CGM acquisition that we made, that's really a big step towards intelligent orchestration for the 24/7 environment.

Well, first of all, I think it's actually good that the process industries are conservative in terms of maintaining the safety and security of the processes. These are mission-critical operations that have to be continued in any case. But at the same time, I think it's important to recognize that often technology actually allows improving safety and security. So if you look at removing people from danger zones, which can be good both for productivity as well as for safety, by for instance enabling remote operation, remote collaboration as well, that unlocks a lot of productivity potential but it also gets you better safety.

I think a very strong potential for almost everyone is adding services to an existing installation that you already have, supporting your installed base with better services with remote collaboration, so that for instance you can draw on the expertise of someone who may be part of your own corporation and sitting at a different site, who may be part of ABB, and looking at the same data as you're looking, complementing your expertise, helping you for instance to find the right spare part, finding the right solution. We've had a case recently on an FPSO where one of the drives had an issue and the crew on board of the FPSO, they saw this was getting in the way of maintaining production levels, so they contacted us. We had to hook up between the people who again — things and people — so the people were talking to the people, the people who were connecting to the drive, and together they actually worked out the root cause of the disturbance, they identified the right spare part that was actually on board of the vessel, and were able to mitigate the disturbance in a very short period of time, so that the production impact actually didn't materialize.

I think we're back to the headline of the Internet of Things, Services, and People. I think there are pieces that stay the same — some of the basic things in a process plant will still be there, but there will be intelligent things with connectivity. I am not a believer in the lights-out factory which was envisioned in the '80s and never materialized. I firmly believe that it will actually be those things and the services enabling people to take better decisions, more informed decisions about a wider scope, also commercially closing the next loop on the business level as well. So from my perspective, we won't see full automation, but we will see a lot more automation that enables collaboration between people but also enables better information exchange between things.

We're in a very interesting phase where we have new technology type installations and we have some very old ones out there, and we've got very seasoned operators who bring a lot of experience with process situations. At the same time, we've got digital natives entering the workforce who may not have seen this same amount of process experience but actually they are highly familiar with the IT tools. And I think a lot of good is to be gained there when people are working together and when we train them and when we cross-train them. I think each of these groups has something to learn from the other. So the digital natives have natural expectations on how they get contextual information, how they get better decision support, how they get rich user interfaces on all sorts of platforms, while the seasoned operators have obviously seen a lot of things that still need to be trained when it comes to situations and abnormal situation handling — they've been there, done that. I think the ability to go beyond your own area of experience and expertise, to learn from others as well as then to be trained on those new technologies in a lifelong learning kind of way, I see that as a key to making sure both the older installations and the new ones, with both the experienced as well as the newer cross-operators, are working together effectively.

Well, our corporate tagline is indeed 'Power and Productivity for a Better World', so the integration of the automation and the electrical is a core piece of that. We're basing on open standards; we've been one of the pioneers behind the IEC 61850 standard, which is a great way of not just the electrical products talking amongst each other, but also connecting the electrical and the automation world. So in terms of what this does, it reduces risk, it reduces costs, and it improves the operability, and thus the lifecycle cost of the asset.