automation
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How Managers Can Keep Unions on Their Side
- September 1, 2024
- Posted by: Nanette Gregory
- Category: Business, Leadership, Manufacturing
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I had a rule as a manager that I would never take union leadership by surprise. If anything, despite the traditional “management versus the union” conflict, I always believed they were an important part of my team. For example, if I was ever thinking of initiating a new process or major idea, I would share
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The Role of Safety Audits in Preventing Workplace Accidents
- August 21, 2024
- Posted by: Nanette Gregory
- Category: Manufacturing, Safety
I’m going to say something that’s going to upset some people. There should be no safety audits in a factory setting. Why is that? Because safety audits are like restaurant inspections. Everyone who has ever worked in a restaurant knows the dirty little secret: when you know a health inspector is showing up, everyone makes
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Why Hiring is Going Down While Output or Skilled Labor Hiring is Going Up
- December 11, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Productivity
Depending on which news source you read, manufacturing jobs are on the rise or they’re dropping faster than gravity. Some states are seeing major layoffs, while other states have hundreds, or even thousands, of new job openings for manufacturing labor, especially skilled labor. The overall trend seems to be on an upward slope for a
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When Should Companies Adopt Manufacturing Automation?
- September 25, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing
We’ve already decided that manufacturing automation is eventually going to be a commonplace manufacturing method. But when and how much is up to each individual company. Will they embrace it quickly and try to transform the entire company? Will a new company try to build itself on manufacturing automation? Or will older, larger companies slowly
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Manufacturing Automation: Don’t Laugh at the Bear That’s About to Eat You
- September 18, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing
Manufacturing automation is changing the workplace and changing our jobs, and we can’t ignore it or pretend it’s not going to happen to our industry. It happened before in the 1970s and ’80s when simple robotic arms began handling some of the tedious lifting and placing of heavier and unwieldy objects, like car doors and
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How We Used Automation to Increase Productivity, Reduce Errors, and Reduce Waste
- March 6, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Innovation
Several years ago, when I was the president of Robroy, we were faced with a problem of how to deal with an old business that was run down, obsolete, and had an employee retention problem (we would lose 20% of our workforce every time we conducted a random drug test). This was my world without
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Lessons Learned During a Factory Refurbishment
- January 23, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Innovation, Manufacturing
When we redesigned and refurbished an old fiberglass liner factory, one of my big concerns was worker safety. We had seen a lot of injuries in the plant over the years, and it was not a clean factory to begin with. We wanted something that was cleaner, could operate with fewer associates, and had more
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Why is Automation So Important?
- January 16, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing
As artificial intelligence and machine learning grows by leaps and bounds, and the field of robotics is light years ahead of where it was just ten years ago, industrial automation is becoming a regular part of the manufacturing process, as more companies are embracing a machine-based future. The biggest reason for this sea change is
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What Role is Automation Going to Play Over the Next 20 Years
- February 7, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Innovation, Manufacturing
Believe it or not, automation and robotics are going to improve our economy and our employment numbers, and can even help improve the education of our workers. U.S. unemployment is low, we have a vibrant economy, and we’re likely to have selective immigration, which means if we’re going to continue to grow, we need to