Building The Manufacturing 4.0 Workforce in Eastern Kentucky

At the end of each year, organizations like the American Dialect Society and Merriam-Webster pick a "Word Of The Year" winner and then a list of other words that made their respective Top Tens for the year. With everything that has happened so far in 2020, there is going to be a slew of contenders to be considered. One word that I think will show up on someone's Top Ten is "Reshoring."

Reshoring, as defined by the Reshoring Initiative, is the practice of bringing manufacturing and services back to the US from overseas. In the process of doing so we can help balance trade and budget deficits, reduce unemployment by creating well-paying manufacturing jobs, and developing a skilled workforce. Reshoring also benefits manufacturing companies by potentially reducing the total cost of their products, especially in the new post-COVID world.

The issue is we need to do this reshoring in an intelligent manner so that it sticks and the only way to do that is making investment in industrial automation and a similar investment in a workforce that can maximize that automation to its fullest. By creating a super-powered manufacturing workforce, we can make reshoring stick and returning the US to being the world's manufacturing powerhouse.

So how do we make this reshoring "sticky" so the jobs stay? The answer may be in the small town of Paintsville, Kentucky, where some very smart public-private investments have created a workforce development organization that is already producing results, improving lives, and is still only getting out of second gear.

Moving From Coal Mining To Manufacturing 4.0

There is no way to sugar coat it, the US Coal Industry continues to shrink and will do so for the foreseeable future. A recent report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated US coal production dropping another 25% in 2020. Further, the mines in the Appalachia parts of the US would see a bigger drop in production of closer to 35%. Much of this year's drop is due to COVID impact on the world economy. However, coal production was already been in decline as other energy sources became more in favor due to cost, environmental concerns, and societal pressures.

Visionary individuals like Kathy Walker, herself part of the coal industry in eastern Kentucky, saw these pressures early on and had the foresight to start planning for how to transform the mining workforce as coal jobs started to disappear into something new. Her response was the founding of the Eastern Kentucky Advanced Manufacturing Institute, also known as eKAMI.

With initial help from the Gene Haas Foundation with a $1.5 million grant and then a $2.5 million grant from the Kentucky Division of Abandoned Mines, eKAMI was able to get started training former coal miners and local young people just entering the workforce on the new equipment that makes up today's modern factories. Since their first class in 2017, eKAMI has provided trained individuals to companies such as AutoGuide Robotics, Lockheed Martin, Heartland Automation, and Roush-Yates Manufacturing. Many eKAMI grads have job offers half way through their program which can range from an accelerated 16-week program to a 9-month program.

Making this all even more impressive is that most students have absolutely no experience in any sort of manufacturing technology when they first walk in the eKAMI doors. However, when they leave they are trained in the use of CNC machines and other pieces of equipment like 3D Printers and are ready to hit the modern factory floor running. It is no surprise that after a company hires one eKAMI grad, they continue going back to hire another one and another one.

With their already proven success, Kathy and the rest of her team at eKAMI could have stopped there. It was getting results, so why not continued to train the students in the existing curriculum. The reason why was that the eKAMI team realized that there was still more the students needed to be prepared for to not only to continue to land those jobs, but also make those jobs so "sticky" that they would never leave the US down the road. So the team took on the next skill set that employers are screaming for.

Adding Robotics To The Mix

What was interesting early on was that some eKAMI grads were finding jobs as robot technicians upon graduating, even though there was no real "robot training" in the eKAMI curriculum. Did I mention how well prepared these students are? Well that lack of a "robot curriculum" changed recently when eKAMI partnered with Columbus, Ohio based READY Robotics to start a 3-week robotic training program to eKAMI's course list.

Using READY's Forge/OS that is robot agnostic and uses a smartphone-like, drag-and-drop, flowchart programming interface, students can quickly learn to program and put to use numerous types on robots on the factory floor in little time. So now eKAMI students will have the ability to not only program the CNC machines to produce various parts, but they can also program the robot to tend the CNC machines placing unfinished parts in and taking finished parts out. BOOM! eKAMI students are now super powered workers on the factory floor!

The students also benefit greatly from learning on the Forge/OS platform due to it being robot agnostic. The goal that READY co-founders Benjamin Gibbs and Kel Guerin had when they build their software was that it would work with as many different types of robot arms as possible. As Kel stated in a recent article:

Over 70 different companies produce industrial robots today. The robotics market is also expanding at an accelerating rate, which means a company buying an industrial robot today has a wide variety of brands and models to choose from. It stands to reason then that a company should be able to pick the right robot for the job, regardless of brand. 

What this means is that eKAMI students can be trained on a whole host of different robot arms and get them moving in various use cases from machine tending to palletization while still at eKAMI. It doesn't matter if it is a Universal Robot UR10 or a Yaskawa GP12 or a FANUC CR-15iA, the students will be able to program them using the Forge/OS product and understand the different steps that go into those unique use cases. This skill of being able to be exposed to numerous vendors early in their training will create a solid baseline for the students to grow from.

So if eKAMI graduates were not highly sought before, the addition of this new training will put their graduates in a top tier that only few others could achieve outside of a multi-year college program. And even then it would be only those handful of institutions with large robotic labs and/or manufacturing labs. Which brings all of this even more in focus. eKAMI is accomplishing this training in under a year! In as little as a 16-week period, this organization is training students on advanced manufacturing technology AND robotics - the two things this country needs for the current reshoring of manufacturing jobs to stick and stay here.

The Blueprint Is Here

What is happening in Paintsville can be duplicated elsewhere. It is going to take the willingness by both government officials and business leaders to make the investments. There is already a push by businesses in our new post-COVID world to make big investments in technology, especially when it comes to the manufacturing sector which has been severely lacking in automation like robotics and IoT.

However, automation for automation sake is not going to get the US back to being the manufacturing powerhouse it once was. To do that we need to invest just as much in our people, in the workforce that is going to pull out every bit of that automation's productivity. That is how we truly bring manufacturing back with automation and humans working together.

Peter Zelinski, Editor-in-Chief of Modern Machine Shop, stated in a recent article about the impact of COVID-19 and the case for automation: "People are valuable." We need to take that into account. Automation can not switch quickly from making car parts to ventilators. As Mr. Zelinski says that takes humans. If we train our people on how to use the automation, be it CNC machines or robotic arms, they will be able to do anything they set their minds to.

It just comes down to asking the questions are we willing to put in the investment dollars for that training and are we going to roll up our sleeves and get to work?