2018 CEO Insights: Warwick Bardsley

What opportunities do you predict for your industry in 2018?

2018 will be an interesting year in the instrumentation electrical and control arena. The Mega LNG projects are basically finished and have entered the operational phase, but mining is showing some signs of modest investment, which is a pleasing turnaround. The emphasis now in all industries is efficiency gains with fast payback. This changes the skill and competencies needed to be successful. Those that will do well are those that understand their customers’ real opportunities for improvement. 2018 should be a solid but not overly spectacular year.

What impact will big data and smart device technology have on your industry in 2018?

In some ways, the instrumentation and control industry has been waiting for the rest of the world to catch up for some time. Digital ‘smart’ devices (although it be at extremely slow baud rates) have been available since the early 90s from many of the leaders in instrumentation. Now comes the question: “what do we do with that information?” This is where the impact of big data comes in. The what-if questions are starting to be answered, and often by inquisitive individuals that are not from the traditional disciplines.

There is a merging of the minds. For decades, we have been providing better and better accuracy — which is important for process control — but now it’s about trends, what-ifs, data patterns, predictive and feedforward information, all calculated in real time. This is the impact.

What do you see as the biggest challenges that will face your industry in 2018?

Our industry, like all others, faces global competition and equalisation. Is a European engineer at $200 per hour any better or worse than an engineer from Central or Eastern Asia at $50 per hour?

This provides challenges for local organisations and individuals in higher cost countries. The ones that will survive and prosper are the ones that accept the paradigm, and reassess their place in it. If there is no realisable value to the end user or buyer of the service locally then the service will go offshore to a lower cost provider. Industry needs to understand it, accept it, use it, and capitalise and add value to it. Only organisations that can harness this changed and changing landscape will be the winners — the protectionists will be the losers unfortunately. Everyone needs to have a global outlook and seek opportunities internally and externally.

What percentage of your management time is being spent on the general theme of digitisation and how will this impact your business in 2018?

Digitisation is the hot topic and a lot of our time from a strategic and deliverables perspective is spent here. The general marketplace has woken up, and within our industry we have always had a plethora of digital solutions that have been providing digital data regarding process conditions for many years. With this awakening, and with the digitalisation of signals at source, this potentially changes the whole playing field. The proprietary and industry-based protocols are being migrated to more open platforms and as such, this opens the field to both new entrants and to growth in the industry in general. Our industry starts with the physical interface between the real analog world and the digital world. Our solutions take many points in time and digitalise them. This allows that information to be transmitted, stored, analysed and interpreted without error and distortion. We live digitally now, but with the rise in understanding of what is possible with data integration, we stand in a position to deliver on the digital promise. The challenge is to produce tangible value, not just something to which we say “oh that’s interesting”.

How should Australian industry respond to global competition?

Firstly, the long-term answer is not to try to win on price or to put up walls. We are a small population of 24 million people with a powerhouse of industrial capacity and bigger populations just to the north of us. If you operate a business in Australia today, particularly in the manufacturing or globally transportable service industries (IT, finance etc.) you can’t just look at the domestic market. Firstly, we have to drop the inferiority complex. We collectively are better than the rest of the world. Why? Because we go out and experience it. Immigration, along with those collective rights of passages to the UK, USA, Asia, or Europe let us understand how to get things done, working either domestically or globally.

We can operate comfortably in multiple measurement units, standards and jurisdictions. Yes, we are at the bottom of the world, but we have the best containerised transport system and most efficient ports in the world. If you can fit it in a 20- or 40-foot container, let’s do it! The other side of this is in realising that sometimes it can’t fit it in a container or from a cost base we can’t compete. In that case, what can we do smarter and better than anybody else in the world? We are “people people” generally — we get things done, on time, at the correct quality — but let’s get our international glasses on. Our local market is too small for the long-term success of domestically focused industries. The government is realising this and is supporting it with various programs, which is great to see.

Warwick Bardsley is Managing Director of the Australian operations of Endress+Hauser, a Swiss-based innovator and manufacturer of both lab and process instrumentation. Warwick has worked from the ground up in industrial instrumentation and control over a career of more than 30 years, and has a family history in manufacturing and small business operations and engagement.

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