Go BackThe truth about factory automation no one likes to admit
It’s not a trending headline. It’s a daily reality across factories in EMEA and it’s where performance is really won or lost.
By Luca Bertocci and Piotr Siwek
Walk into a modern factory and you’ll see everything we like to talk about at conferences. Smart systems. Connected machines. Real time dashboards. Precision robotics moving with quiet confidence.
Yet behind this technological precision, the human factors in industrial automation often determine whether systems perform at their full potential or quietly fall short.
That moment never appears in brochures. Yet it is exactly where performance is won or lost.
Piotr Sivek, Mitsubishi Electric FA EMEA Digital Marketing Director and Global MCoE Manager, has seen that moment more times than he can count.
“The system is running,” he says, “but something doesn’t feel right. Not wrong enough to stop. Not clear enough to ignore. That’s when experience matters more than specifications.”
That is the side of automation we rarely talk about.
Technology evolves fast. Interfaces improve. Systems become smarter. Yet performance gaps often appear not in the machines, but in the space between systems and the people who operate them.
This is where the human factors in industrial automation begin to shape whether technology delivers its full potential.
Automation has made factories more precise, no doubt. But precision is not the same as predictability.
Factories are not closed mathematical systems. They are environments where people still interpret signals, decide whether an alarm is critical, adjust parameters under time pressure, and live with the consequences if production stops.
Automation has reduced routine intervention. What it has increased is the weight of non-routine judgment. That is where Piotr sees reality diverge from the model.
He often talks about “perfect systems that nobody fully uses”.
In one European facility, a production line had advanced optimization and diagnostic tools. On paper, downtime reduction was achievable. In practice, operators stayed with basic functions.
Nothing was technically broken, but advanced features felt risky. Too complex, too easy to misuse.
“If I change this and something goes wrong, I’m the one responsible.” That silent thought shaped performance more than any algorithm.
The turning point did not come from new hardware. It came from people. Mitsubishi Electric engineers working side by side with operators, running real production scenarios, explaining system behavior, answering questions that never appear in manuals.
“Once confidence grows,” Piotr says, “people start using what the system can already do. Performance follows.” The hardware was never the bottleneck. Psychological distance was.
Another case was more extreme.
A manufacturer received a machine from China with complex FX5 PLC logic. Modern hardware. Sophisticated system. No documentation. No explanation of how the internal logic worked.
A Mitsubishi Electric Factory Automation technical support specialist took responsibility for the project.
“It was quite challenging,” he said. “I needed to understand a system I had never seen before.”
The machine was not defective. It was incomprehensible.
Operators avoided adjustments. The line ran below potential because nobody wanted to trigger unknown behavior. Everthon reverse engineered the logic, translated it into something the customer could understand, and guided the team until they felt confident.
The machine did not change. Human understanding did. Production finally reached its intended level.
Automation without human translation is only potential sitting on the shop floor.
These stories share something most procurement processes underestimate: the human factor (and, in particular, service).
In many large factory automation organizations, service is treated as a cost to control. Something to standardize. Something to cut.
On the factory floor, service is often the difference between theoretical capability and real performance.
Support reduces hesitation in critical moments, makes advanced features usable, and turns undocumented machines into productive assets.
Piotr is clear about it. “Technology sets the potential. People decide how much of that potential becomes real. And people need support.”
Support is not a nice extra. It is operational infrastructure.
Without it, even the most advanced system remains partially untapped.
This is why the story of fully autonomous factories misses something essential.
The most advanced factories are not those that minimize the human role. They are those that build strong human support around complex systems.
Service in that context is not aftersales. It is a performance multiplier. An ROI enabler. Sometimes more decisive than technical specifications.
Because when something doesn’t fit the manual, when optimization requires insight nobody programmed, when production depends on a decision made under pressure, the most expensive component in a factory is not a robot or a PLC.
It is human behavior.
The Human-Centric Factory Playbook
If automation amplifies the importance of human judgment and support, then the question for leaders is practical: “what should we do differently?”
Based on what we see in the field, three shifts matter.
- Design for real humans, not ideal users
Engineers often design for the system working perfectly. Operators work in environments with noise, pressure, time constraints and uncertainty. If a feature exists but people hesitate to use it, its ROI is theoretical.
- Treat service as part of the solution, not an add-on
Fast access to expertise reduces hesitation, accelerates problem resolution, increases adoption of advanced functions, and builds confidence. Service is human risk management inside automated systems.
- Measure human confidence, not only technical KPIs
Ask if operators feel comfortable using advanced features, if maintenance teams understand system behavior deeply, and if people know who to call when reality does not match documentation. Confidence drives usage. Usage drives ROI.
Automation will keep advancing. Systems will grow more sophisticated.
But as Piotr’s experiences show, the performance frontier in modern factories is no longer only technical. It is human.
The factories that win will not be those with the most automation.
They will be those where technology and human capability are designed to work together.
In other words, the real competitive advantage increasingly lies in understanding the human factors in industrial automation.
community@humancg.com 
+44 0203 693 4480 
London | Milano | Napoli | Krakow | Budapest