Automation and robotics have been a growing part of the manufacturing sector for years and it would only seem reasonable that a global pandemic that spreads when people are in close contact would accelerate that trend.
As it happens, several area builders of automation systems say they are seeing an increase in interest in their services. The reason, however, seems to have less to do with the need to keep employees six feet apart and more to do with challenges finding employees in general.
“Nobody has ever said that any of this was COVID-induced,” said Eric Wentz, chief executive officer of Delavan-based custom automation builder Better By Design.
Wentz said business was slowing down toward the end of last year with some projects being delayed. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, everything shut down as his customers scrambled to work remotely and figure out what they were dealing with.
Since July, however, Wentz said there has been an increase in activity.
“It still qualifies as birds in the bush, so to speak, but there are a lot more birds in the bush,” he said, adding that the customer interest seems to be going beyond people simply kicking the tires on automation ideas.
Bob Gross, founder of Brookfield-based Gross Automation, said many companies within his customer base did cutbacks when the pandemic hit. Engineering teams of 10 people may have been cut down to five. But customers also took the opportunity to spend time developing new products and kept engineers on for that work because of things like the Paycheck Protection Program.
“In the last five years before the crisis, there wasn’t a lot of new product development,” Gross said. “I’m going to bet that as we come out of the crisis, you’re going to see a lot of new product development and a lot of that was funded through use of the PPP funds to keep people employed when the business wasn’t there.”
That new product development hasn’t turned into business for Gross quite yet. He noted it takes time for things to work their way through the system and customers have not been able to display their work at trade shows or get on the road to sell it.
“This creates an environment where, yeah, automation is going to increase,” he said. “The COVID crisis, personally, I think, is going to push automation ahead by a couple years.”
Paul Szeflinski, president of New Berlin-based systems integration company IAS Inc., said he also expects to see more adoption of automation to address crowded areas in production, eliminate the need for humans to do remedial tasks and support the onshoring of work done overseas. In general, he said these trends had started prior to the pandemic.
“We started to see interesting trends as companies weren’t so focused on that return on investment for automation, but they were more concerned with how do I even get this product out the door anymore,” Szeflinski said.
He added that in industries like food and beverage or plastics where “the standard practice was just to throw more people at it,” more companies are expressing interest in incorporating automation to ramp up production.
Kyle Weise, director of marketing at IAS, said the food and beverage industry has been marked by a reliance on manual labor and high turnover. Those in the automation industry have been waiting for a time when food and beverage begins to shift toward technology and that appears to be happening now.
“I think we’ll find out in the coming couple years,” Weise said.
Szeflinski said many companies don’t know where to start when it comes to automation.
“A lot of places, there aren’t any chief automation officers or anybody in that type of role to help guide them through that process,” he said.
IAS is also seeing increased interest from foundries where automation might already be used in melting or pouring but now is expanding into inspection, pick and place, grinding, polishing, and de-burring processes, Szeflinski said.
The plastics industry has also shown more interest in going beyond unloading injection molding machines to degating parts, removing flashing and packing.
“Historically, they just dump the parts in a bin and then somebody else has to sort them, somebody has to take them out and do all these extra processes. It just adds a lot of labor content to it,” Szeflinski said.
In addition to addressing labor needs, he said improvements in technology and pricing have made automation more practical, pointing specifically to advances in machine vision.
“I’m not talking about the artificial intelligence space, that’s a whole other topic, but more in the robotic guidance, the ability to grab a product out of a random bin of products rather than having them manually sorted,” Szeflinski said.
Wentz also said that the availability of labor appears to be a driving factor in the interest in automation.
“We still can’t get skilled labor,” he said. “If you drive through the industrial park I’m in or drive through any industrial park, you still see the signs out … and I don’t think it’s because they forgot to take the sign down.”
While the unemployment rate in Wisconsin went from near historic lows at 3.1% up to historic highs at 13.6%, nearly 40% of the jobs lost came from the leisure and hospitality sector and another 11% came from retail trade. Many manufacturers have lamented the challenge of hiring and retaining employees coming from more service-oriented sectors of the economy and for years before the pandemic they struggled to find skilled labor.
Wentz said the increased interest in automation may also be the result of companies having additional capital available because of the PPP program or other forms of government support during the pandemic.
He also noted customers don’t always have a clear idea of how they need to go about automating.
“There are more requests for robots, even when a robot is not really the most optimal way to go,” Wentz said. “Instead of talking them into using a robot, we end up trying to talk them out of it in cases where they’re just spending way too much money and getting way too little out of it.”
He added that customers don’t always realize “what it takes for them to care and feed this machine zoo they have.” A company like Better by Design might be able to build a new automation system, but then the customer’s maintenance team will also need to upgrade their skills. Depending on what equipment the customer wants, they may also need to buy expensive subscriptions to keep their software up to date.
With automation, robotics and other technologies continuing to advance and increasing attention paid to ideas like Industry 4.0 or the Industrial Internet of Things, there is a narrative that the U.S. is behind other countries when it comes to advanced manufacturing.
Gross, who prior to the pandemic frequently traveled on Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. trade ventures, disagreed with that assessment.
“We are not behind the rest of the world. We are so far ahead of the rest of the world,” he said.
There have been cases where Gross says he has done work in the U.S. for multi-national companies and then shown off the work at the corporate parent on his international travels. He said the corporate teams were impressed and questioned where the technology came from.
“There are a lot of companies out there that don’t know where to start,” he said. “Yeah, we have people who haven’t kept up with everything, at the same time, we’re not behind.”
