The automation debate: partial makeover or complete transformation?

(See WAGO at Machine Building South, 8 July 2026, on stand 115)

In elite sport, performance coaches instruct athletes to ignore external factors and to concentrate on what they can control. As the mantra in competitive sport goes, you can only affect your performance, not the result.

It's somewhat similar for operators of business facilities. The outside world generates headwinds that risk slowing a business's progress: constrained access to investment capital, high energy costs, a shortage of people with critical skills, and intensifying international competition which often benefit from lower costs and a high level of technical sophistication.

Organisations cannot wish these factors away, but like the elite athlete, they can control their response to them. Automation is one of the most effective responses. The automation of technical operations means that companies can:

• Reduce energy costs by lowering consumption through efficiency improvements
• Ease staffing bottlenecks and improve cost competitiveness by reducing or eliminating the need for manual performance of routine tasks
• Increase system reliability by running systems according to logical processes and reducing the scope for human error

When a company starts evaluating the options for automation, another athletics-inspired mantra is often invoked: no pain, no gain. A new automation project is often presented as an all-or-nothing business operation: to gain any benefit from automation, it is often claimed, a building's entire legacy systems need to be ripped out, and replaced by a complete, unified set of hardware and software components, all sourced from a single supplier to ensure interoperability. It's often experienced as the organisational equivalent of tearing the plaster off a fresh wound.

And in fact, this all-or-nothing approach is not the only possible way.

Slow and steady wins the race

It is certainly true that monolithic, proprietary systems are assembled from constituent components which work together happily. But industry standards and open protocols for automation equipment, such as Profinet for connecting industrial equipment or KNX for lighting devices, are made for interoperability between different vendors' products.

And this means that an incremental, step-wise approach to extending automation is feasible, marrying new equipment with legacy devices and networks from multiple manufacturers. In fact, it's not only feasible, but often preferable for all but the largest of Britain's industrial and commercial facilities.

Why is this? It's because the incremental approach avoids the risks and downsides associated with grand, comprehensive automation projects while providing measurable improvement in efficiency, performance and reliability. Installing new automation technology alongside existing systems enables an organisation to:

• Retain scarce capital resources. By keeping legacy systems in place and only adding new equipment where it provides a substantial performance uplift or important new capabilities, companies limit the upfront costs associated with automation.
• Minimise disruption to continuing operations. A partial upgrade allows existing systems to extend uptime and avoid the need for the complete shutdown that is necessary when all-new systems are brought online.
• Mitigate implementation risk. With a phased introduction of new automation systems, changes can be implemented, reviewed and refined - or even temporarily rolled back - without bringing the whole operation to a halt. In an all-or-nothing automation project, any failure in a single section or component risks crashing the entire operation.

The more flexible approach to implementing automation, blending the latest technology - controllers, switches, I/O modules, displays and software - with legacy devices and networks is supported by WAGO and a wide range of other equipment suppliers which adhere to industry standards for interoperability.

And by leaning on the knowledge and experience of a system supplier such as WAGO, companies can benefit from the lessons learned across hundreds of previous blended installations. Tailored solutions ensure that the full value of existing infrastructure can be realised while gaining significant efficiency and cost benefits from the application of the most up-to-date technology.

It was British cycling's successful Olympic medal winners who popularised the concept of incremental gains - the idea that a succession of small, detailed improvements accumulate over time to give a sufficient edge to achieve a decisive victory. Industrial and commercial organisations can take inspiration from this, and reject the rip-and-replace approach to modernisation in favour of the deliberate, incremental improvement of their automation systems.