In our latest Technology Tuesdays podcast, Design World’s Michelle Froese speaks with Mitsubishi Electric Automation’s product marketing manager for mechatronics and robotics, Patrick Varley.

In this discussion, we delve into the topic of robotic automation and software provider solutions — and, specifically, how this combination can help ease labor shortages. Patrick explains the significance of consumer personalization and how advanced technology from leading innovators can address the contemporary issues facing today’s manufacturers. Listen in:

 

The audio and a lightly edited transcript of this conversation follows below …

Design World (DW): Hello Everyone! Welcome to Design World’s Technology Tuesday’s Podcast. I’m Michelle Froese. In this podcast, we speak with Patrick Varley, the product marketing manager for mechatronics and robotics at Mitsubishi Electric Automation. Patrick is an automation industry veteran with more than 35 years of automation experience, including systems integration, robot and vision system supply and distribution.

In his role as product marketing manager, Patrick is driven by the challenge of solving customers’ needs through innovative and durable automation solutions. Today, we will discuss robotics and software provider solutions and specifically how this combination can help ease labor shortages. This, along with consumer personalization, has been a big topic in the current manufacturing environment. It’s also a topic Patrick presented at PACK EXPO back in October, so we’re fortunate to have him join us to share some of those thoughts now.  Patrick, thanks so much for your time today.

Patrick Varley (PV): Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on.

DW: First question for you… of all the issues facing manufacturing today, why did you pick labor shortages and consumer personalization?

PV: Yes, I picked these two topics because they have a lot in common. They can both be addressed through the use of robots, but how you implement your robotic automation goes a long way toward success in mitigating these issues.

You see, by themselves, robots really don’t do anything. To get a system that could perform a task, you need hardware such as a base, safety, a gripper for the robot, and items such as these. Someone has to design the system, select the components, and put everything together. Finding a qualified person who has the time and experience to do this can be a real challenge. And when you get the system designed and the components all put together, you still aren’t quite in production. You need software to tell the robot what to do, monitor and control the other components of the work cell, and communicate with the other systems in your facility.

How you go about this will strongly impact the usability of your system down the road. And now that you have a working system in place, you’ll find out how good of a job that you did when the inevitable happens, you need to make changes. And that’s really when labor shortages and responding to changing consumer habits have their largest impact.

DW: Now let’s talk about how labor shortages can impact robotic automation.

PV: Certainly! Labor shortages cause a ripple effect in manufacturing, specifically a variety of near-term production issues. Frequently, manufacturers can’t get enough people to staff align or process and they can’t fulfill their orders. In fact, 22% of manufacturers have indicated that they’re having a difficult time hiring and retaining technicians according to the Peerless Research Group and competition for workers is causing more job hopping with Gartner indicating that the U.S. total annual employee turnover will jump by nearly 20% from pre-pandemic annual averages.

In October, manufacturers had the highest number of employees in almost 14 years at just under 13 million people, but there were still over 800,000 openings according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That equates to roughly a 6% shortfall in workers. This is putting manufacturers in a constant state of recruiting, replacing and retraining. The cost of labor is rising, too. It’s up 5% for the year ending September of 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And as you can imagine, this increases the overall cost of manufacturing.

If these issues are impacting your suppliers, you may have to pay more for materials that you need to make your product. And there is an increasing likelihood you might not get what you need when you need it. Even if you’ve implemented robotic automation in your facility, if you can’t keep a steady supply of materials coming to it, whether they’re purchased components or created in your facility, the ability to manufacture your product will be lessened.

And again, the labor shortage impacts manufacturers in a few ways. It’s hard to get and keep qualified workers, labor costs more and there aren’t a lot of engineers with automation experience left on staff or available on short notice. Unfortunately, these issues don’t appear to be going away anytime soon. But fortunately, the implementation of intelligent automation, including robotics at your facility as well as those of your suppliers, will increase the consistency of products — both in quality and with delivery. This is the goal, but getting there can be difficult.

DW: Those stats you shared are quite significant. I asked you initially about consumer personalization, but perhaps I first should have asked you what it is and why it is important?

PV: Thank you. Yes… consumer personalization is something that we’re all aware of, but a lot of people haven’t quite put their finger on the definition yet. And what it is… it’s defined as an individualized experience that is created on a specific customer request or order.

For example, think about online shopping versus going to a store for some clothes. Previously, you went to a store, looked at what they had and bought something if it was what you needed or close enough. The clothes that you saw were likely made quite a while ago and you picked from a limited number of sizes, colors, and styles. When what you wanted wasn’t available, you either bought something that was similar or left with nothing at all. With online shopping, you can customize your purchase in any number of ways and quickly move on to another provider if you don’t like what you’re seeing.

Vendors can’t keep an unlimited supply of every color, size, and style combination so manufacturing is often called on to produce a custom one-off order. And for those of us in the manufacturing industry, we know that traditional automation isn’t set up for this type of production and neither are most production lines that are manual. Most equipment and processes were designed for long runs of the same or very similar products. Customized variants were expected to take longer and cost more. Now consumers want their exact combination of features, without paying extra. And, of course, we all expect our order to arrive on our doorstep in a day or so.

As with the labor issues, this is a trend that isn’t going away anytime soon. Nulogy indicated that 25% of online shoppers are interested in trying customization options. The implementation of flexible robotic automation will give you the best opportunity to respond to this change in consumer expectations.

DW: That online world has certainly changed a lot for us. So, how widespread are these problems for manufacturers, Patrick?

PV: In a word, very. In a recent article by James Rice of MIT that appeared in the Material Handling Institute’s online newsletter, he indicated that flexibility in reconfiguring resources can be just as important as redundancy in building resilience. He also mentioned that organizations should invest in materials and production facilities that can be quickly reconfigured. Also, changing production lines require a workforce with multiple skills so that workers can be deployed quickly. And again, going back to the labor shortage, this is quite a challenge.

DW: Thanks, Patrick. Can you share more now about Mitsubishi Electric Automation and how it fits into all of this?

PV: Yes, for those of us not familiar with Mitsubishi Electric Automation, very simply put, we make the things that make things… automation components and equipment such as servo motors, PLCs, HMIs, CNC controls, and of course robotics.

One of the considerations that Mitsubishi has when we design our products is something that we call QPC, which stands for quality, performance, and compatibility. All of our products are designed and manufactured with the highest quality standards to deliver unmatched performance. We also know that since our customers tend to use our products for a long time, we build compatibility into new products to make it easier to have a mix of current and slightly older technology that works seamlessly together.

When you combine our products with creative people — both ones from within Mitsubishi and through third parties — you get solutions that can address contemporary issues such as the two we’ve been talking about: labor shortages and consumer personalization.

DW: I like the QPC concept. Now, in terms of labor shortages and consumer personalization and how they tie into Mitsubishi, can you please share an example or two of how they would all work together to become a product?

PV: Absolutely! Sharing an example or two is very easy because there are quite a few out there. But the one that I would like to highlight was based on a system that we had in our booth at PACK EXPO and it was a robotic system that was designed and built by one of our e-F@ctory Alliance members, Southie Autonomy.

This Boston-based company has developed a user interface and logic to make frequent changeovers easy and very fast. And both attributes are important. With labor issues and consumer personalization, changes to automation occur much more frequently. In the experience level, the person must implement the change that’s been dropping steadily. Having an inexperienced person make frequent changes is sometimes a recipe for disaster. Being able to make those transitions faster and with less risk with the available plant personnel is key to survival.

This is what I was referencing earlier when I said that you’ll find out how good of a job you did when the inevitable happens. And where Southie fits into this is that they’ve added functionality to Mitsubishi’s equipment that addresses these issues. The added functionality gives users the ability to make adjustments faster, more frequently, and with less skilled and experienced operators.

DW: What kinds of customers would use this technology that companies like Mitsubishi Electric Automation and Southie Autonomy have developed?

PV: There are certainly many, but I’ll describe an application that Southie has had a lot of success with. One of their first customers was a beverage co-packer, and for those of you not familiar with co-packers, one of the services that they provide is to make variety packs of beverages such as a 24-can flat of soda that has one six-pack of each of four flavors. Even though it wasn’t their customer, I’ll give the example in terms of Coca-Cola products.

Coca-Cola makes their products in large batches and ships full-size 40 by 48 by 100-inch pallets of each. This makes it very efficient to make the soda, but a variety pack requires one more step. A co-packer would get pallets of Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, and Cherry Coke for example. A co-packer would then take one six pack of each flavor, put together a 24-canned mix pack, and ship that back to Coca-Cola where it would go onto the stores.

After making this for a while, they may need to switch to 36 can flats consisting of three 12 packs of Coke, Coke Zero, and Diet Coke. This requires a lot of flexibility in the automation and most co-packers handle products of many different sizes from many different producers. Southie Solution allows the co-packer to change configurations easily, typically on a phone app that they developed and very quickly. They could automatically change grippers to accommodate the new can configuration. For example, a 4-by-3 set of 12 cans or even a 6-by-2 set versus the standard 3-by-2 6-pack they ran previously.

By bringing down the experience needed for fast and easy changeovers, Southie and Mitsubishi are addressing both the labor shortage and consumer personalization issues.

DW: It sounds like flexibility is key. Do you have any other examples of solutions that address both labor and consumer personalization?

PV: Certainly! If we have time, I’d like to touch on two very briefly. One of the companies that we deal with is named Realtime Robotics, and what they do is they add dynamic path planning and collision avoidance to our robots. The system constantly monitors the location of each robot in a work cell and makes adjustments to the path that each one is taking to optimize overall speed and to avoid collisions.

This is all done extremely quickly in the background and without intervention or reprogramming. In years past, any change in sequence or timing caused the robot programmer to have to manually account for these changes, anticipate possible collisions and adjust the programs accordingly. As you can imagine, this took a very high-level engineer quite a bit of time and a high level engineer and a lot of time are simply two things that manufacturers don’t often have today.

Also, there was no guarantee that the decisions that were made regarding a new sequence of operations created the most efficient runtime solution or unfortunately in some cases, even a safe solution. This could lead to less throughput and equipment collisions if all possible sets of conditions weren’t accounted for.

With Realtime Robotics’ solution, you can adjust to single-part manufacturing runs with no reprogramming. For example, let’s say you’re making consumer products such as an air fryer. Your products are all similar, but there are some options and slight differences. In the past, what’d you do is run in batches and change the programming whenever you change the version of the air fryer that you are making. Now, you simply inform the robot which options the part you’re making requires, and the program that controls the robot is automatically adjusted to use the optimal path to perform the correct sequence without the risk of collisions. It’s easy to see how this addresses both labor issues and consumer personalization.

Finally, the last topic that I’d like to talk about, or the last way that you could approach this problem is through the use of a pre-engineered cell. Many manufacturers have them, and at Mitsubishi Electric Automation we have our own pre-engineered system that has primarily been used for CNC and machine tending, and it’s called LoadMate Plus.

What it is… a pre-engineered building block that includes a base, robot safety, and an HMI and allows a manufacturer to get into production faster than if they had to design the entire system or find someone to do it, obtain components, and put it all together. We have a number of variants to the configuration, different overall sizes, robot options, safety options, and items such as those.

What the LoadMate Plus does is that it eliminates the need for the user to have an automation design experienced staff in-house and find the time to put the system together. It’s also been designed with forklift pockets so that it can be moved from machine to machine as production needs change. As with the other solutions, it lessens the requirement that manufactures a dedicated engineering and design staff, is flexible enough to be quickly reconfigured for new applications, allowing manufacturers to use the employees that they do have in other critical aspects of production.

DW: These technological advances are quite interesting and clearly useful and time-saving. Unfortunately, we’re nearing the end of our time today, Patrick. I feel like I could keep asking you questions, but I will end with one. Is there anything that you’d like to add or share or that I didn’t ask you yet that would help our listeners?

PV: Yes, and I hope you know that I’d be happy to keep answering questions as long as you would ask them.

DW: Thank you.

PV: One of the things that I’d like to leave our listeners with is always make sure you’re working with industry-leading suppliers, such as Mitsubishi Electric Automation, Southie Autonomy, or Realtime Robotics.

At Mitsubishi, our product marketing and business development teams stay on top of business conditions and trends, and we seek out companies such as Southie and Realtime that can develop solutions using our robots and other automation products that address the issues facing manufacturers. This is one of the ways that we’re trying to increase the value that we bring to our customers.

As everybody’s aware, we are in a period of great change in consumer habits and expectations. Techniques and technologies that have been successful for many years might not be as effective as they once were, and manufacturers have to be ready to pivot. Basically, the rules have changed and companies must now adjust or get left behind. And I think that’s probably a good place for me to stop other than to say thank you very much for having me on today.

DW: Thank you so much, Patrick. This has been most informative, and we’d love to have you here again on the podcast so, hopefully, we can arrange it for a future date.

To our listeners, we really appreciate your time and attention. To learn more about us, please visit Design World’s website at designworldonline.com and be sure to subscribe and share this wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks again for listening everyone and have a wonderful day!

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Filed Under: PODCASTS

 

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