In the era of ubiquitous changes and the ever-increasing digitization of the economy and society, all industries are looking for various ways to optimize production processes. Increasing demand and huge export opportunities give great opportunities when it comes to development.
The response of a growing group of companies to the upcoming changes is to invest in the automation of their production lines or the widely understood automation of production.
Today, automated production is becoming the standard that seems to be indispensable for running a competitive production activity. The development of Poland and domestic companies is dynamic, but we still lack a lot to more economically developed countries. The continuous increase in the use of production automation systems is more and more visible.
Most developing countries go through the process of economic automation. It is caused by the desire to catch up with the level of the most economically developed countries.
All those industries in which low production costs are the most important (especially labour costs) are losing importance.
Instead, they are increasingly being taken by sectors that require greater automation of production processes. Although it seems obvious, the development of industrial automation in our country still faces numerous obstacles. The first is the development barrier. The low level of innovation in our home economy, as well as problems with the implementation of new solutions, are still a big problem.
Unfortunately, Poland is still losing ground in this field, mainly to Western economies, but not only to them. Another obstacle to industrial automation is the entrepreneurs’ fear of investments and the unwillingness to enter new market segments. There is little help here from EU funds or state funds to support companies’ innovativeness.
The automotive industry and robotization
Industrial automation and its development depend on the indicated branch of production. Data from the Polish Central Statistical Office (GUS) show that the lion’s share of all automatic and computer-controlled production lines are installed in companies from the refining, chemical and mineral industries. On the other hand, the most numerous group of users of machining centres and laser machine tools are the metal, electronic, machine and electromechanical industries.
When it comes to robots and various types of manipulators, they most often constitute equipment for production plants in the broadly understood transport sector, mainly in the automotive, shipbuilding, aviation and rail industries.
To sum up, the industrial automation industry has very good prospects. The biggest development will be in the industrial robots market. Our economy should significantly increase the pace of automation of production processes to be competitive in the global market.
