This is part 2 of Robots and Sustainability. You can find part 1 at www.ekalore.com/post/robots-and-sustainability
“Process re-engineering” and other trends in the late 1980s-1990s focused on moving from manual paperwork designed business operations into computer-system based applications and business around the computer processing of data. ERP and related applications extended the reach of the computer applications to integrate workers inside and outside of a core enterprise with certain operations moving “all paperless” and “all online”.
The result of these trends was to replace the manual movement of papers-holding-data to a centralized set of computer databases. Examples include payroll (time cards to web attendance), shipping documents (bills of lading and manifests), health records (electronic health records), and credit transactions (credit card receipts and slips). These efforts resulted in streamlining white collar paperwork into more productive workers dealing with exceptions, providing required audit and verification actions, and empires of data in the databases. The new processes used many workers to manually cut/paste data between applications, perform reconciliation, integrate data, smooth data feeds, and handle business cases not programmed into the applications. Now, robots have come for these white-collar workers.
The vehicle manufacturers have negotiated and haggled with worker unions for decades on the use of automated lines and displacement of workers on production lines. Tesla and the new generation of EV manufacturers are rapidly building global enterprises at scale to challenge established national and continental champions with highly automated operations that even established and acknowledge masters of vehicle production cite as more efficient. Ford recently announced a 25% layoff of workers in the ”white collar” portion of its internal combustion engine based operations. The factory workers are likely to see hiring and increases over the same period.
EkaLore has previously released an analysis on the EV manufacturing process and likely impacts of Alien Invaders on the industrial sector. New business models (direct to consumer) and transaction automation (automated billing, payments, reconciliation, and exception handling) for vehicle manufacturers will shift more work (revenue and margin) to fewer workers. The robots have come to the vehicle manufacturers' “back office”.
You can read part three of this article at www.ekalore.com/ars
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