Automation ≠ Innovation (Copy)

If you’ve ever been in an automotive plant, you’ll notice the mixture of manual labor and automation throughout the operations. Whether that’s unloading raw materials from a truck into a warehouse, picking raw materials from the warehouse to deliver to the manufacturing environment, or in the manufacturing processes itself. Obviously, as time has gone on there has been more automation and innovation in having machines either replace manual labor or to greatly assist manual labor in the work that it takes to make a product. Without very much analysis, one might assume that adding a machine to automate some or all of a process will always be more efficient, but that is not always the case. In almost every manufacturing plant in America, people’s wages are the largest budget item. It makes sense that companies seek efficiencies to reduce the manual labor that it takes.

Where does it make the most sense to automate? That’s not an easy question to answer, because there are no many nuances. The number one opportunity to automate work where you can either reduce or eliminate manual work is with dangerous jobs. That might be jobs in high temp environments, metal working, welding, etc. You’ll notice that in many automotive plants the weld stations are mostly robots. That’s partially for speed and efficiency, but there is also obviously the safety component that makes automating those tasks a higher priority.

I’ve personally been involved in several automation projects in both automotive manufacturing and logistics that were implemented solely because a senior plant leader wanted it to appear as if they were innovating. A ton of money spent on implementing the machines (not to mention the cost of salaries for internal teams to work on the project), and then never to achieve reliability or OEE.

In 2016, Mercedes famously removed many of the robots in their manufacturing plant and replaced them with people. The main reason for that? Robot’s were more difficult to adjust to change than people are. Mercedes realized that the resources it takes to constantly change the production environment to keep up with the change in model year were not worth it. They could train people to do the job and they were more flexible in jobs that were hard to maneuver.