Manufacturing Automation – Humans in the Loop
Chris Stergiou
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Industry 4.0 and AI hype have many dreaming of a future manufacturing paradigm whereby machines are working in a “lights out” scenario with human workers barely present as even the maintenance, oversight and management functions are quickly devolved into robotic algorithms and transfer functions, executing both physical and managerial tasks. Of course this may all be a possible future vision, .... but in the mean time, there's real manufacturing that needs to be done!
Applying some proven attributes of GOOD automation, dating back to Archimedes' screw, whereby a continuously and centrally powered mechanical device was proven to be better than having 100 guys with buckets transferring water from the river, what does manufacturing automation really look like? or ....
- What tasks do we relegate to the machines, (if any), and
- What tasks do we reserve for the human workers, (if any)?
The traditional automation rubric has been that machines are excellent at:
While humans excel at:
Robotic, Industry 4.0 and AI innovations are busily “chipping away” at the human attributes with a “search for the holy grail” mania, trying to emulate the surface functions themselves while flirting with nuanced contextual and cognitive functions with “deep learning”.
Given that the optimum mix of labor and capital in manufacturing is always different and variable, based on the availability and cost of each at any point in time and place, manufacturing is always balancing and adjusting between the two and it's all driven by the fundamental economics of the operations to be performed. This, more than ever as the market is global and rarely completely isolated geographically or otherwise.
Advances and maturity of the underlying technologies that enable the automation itself are always happening, and those happen in components such as sensors developments, vision systems, increasingly compact power functions, readily available faster communications and miniaturized computing power and myriad "nuts and bolts" that are integrated into automation. Significantly, there is currently a prolific rate of entrepreneurial startups that are rapidly packaging and deploying various manufacturing automation embodiments, reaching limitations and building a database of concepts and applications, in niche markets .... that according to each business plan will become the world wide standard, surely by next Thursday at the latest.... if not quite yet .... but which are adding to the experiential database of automation.
Regardless, the benefits of manufacturing automation are real, many and the need for increased automation for future success is by now a foregone conclusion. Perhaps not quite Industry 4.0 yet, but significantly increased manufacturing automation none the less.
Most important, while manufacturing automation often involves some innovations in methods, designs and even algorithms, it NEVER involves invention or application of unproven or immature technologies. Manufacturing automation actually has to reliably work!, making “things” on a repeatable and ongoing basis, starting on the day after it's commissioned. Manufacturing automation is not a science project or a proof of principle prototype.
Further, manufacturing automation creates paradigm shifts and disruptions beyond it's intended use and these unintended consequences, mostly positive, can not be easily and fully predicted until the automation is deployed. These disruptions can and do involve the work flow, the level of human worker displacement and skill sets required, production rate re-balancing and many other impacts on the interfacing upstream and downstream processes. These are normal disruptions that are to be expected and dealt with as they are realized and their resolution should always be towards the success of further process improvements, usually involving further automation.
Stipulating that at least in the US and perhaps elsewhere in the world, the majority of manufacturing capacity is operating at inefficient levels with excess, unused capacity and having faith that the competitive markets along with other factors have driven costs to their market minimums, let's examine two fundamental strategic automation options that many/all manufacturers now face.
1st Option
Embrace and execute a “full steam ahead with Industry 4.0” automate everything in sight strategy with full faith that manufacturing without or dramatically reduced human workers and a heavily capitalized infrastructure producing at high speeds, high quality and minimized per unit costs, is the only possible future. We have many historical and successful examples of this strategy going back many decades in industries such as food processing, farming, pharmaceuticals, automobile manufacturing, electronics manufacturing and many others.
And, yet, in each of these industries we still have human workers, with many “automatable” functions still manually performed. Perhaps in support of the automation or even still manually performing some non-ergonomic or sometimes hazardous tasks and at relatively high speeds. In some cases, the automation itself may have created some of the manual tasks.
This approach is an “all in” strategy requiring significant commitment to immediate and ongoing capital investments that fundamentally change not only the labor-capital mix but simultaneously impact the process and can yield significant competitive advantages. Of-course, the risks are commensurate with the potentially high benefits and while each detail doesn't necessarily have to be thought through, a strategic future state, fully automated manufacturing vision needs to be defined at the architectural level to successfully execute.
Following this strategy also requires a technically strong in-house team that manages the strategy, specifies the top level requirements and also has competence in and input into specific automation form factors, hardware-software design. This team will also provide input into some proprietary configurations that are deemed to offer a strategic competitive advantage to the process being automated. Again, not invention but innovation!
The operational attributes of this approach are:
Benefits of 1st Option:
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Challenges of 1st Option:
2nd Option
Embrace and execute an “Industry 4.0 agnostic incremental approach", quickly bringing the level of automation out of the 1980's into perhaps the early 2000's as a minimum. Parsing out and selectively automating manual processes using the guidelines of machine and human functions as listed above while simultaneously utilizing Lean Manufacturing principles to right size and optimize the manufacturing process, sequentially, on a work cell or production line basis. This strategy involves a commitment to a continuous improvement strategy that rationalizes the manufacturing capabilities with the market demand. Implicit in this approach is the use of sound industrial engineering methods and seeking to build a customer centric responsiveness to demand.
With an equally thought out automation strategy as the 1st Option, this approach is less focused on how much labor content is reduced, (although it will be reduced), but is instead focused on creating a predictable takt time or production rate driven solely by customer demand. As such, the automation itself is not the objective, while the economic labor-capital mix is maintained and the customer demand is met. As such, it is a much more responsive and flexible automation model, (within defined limits of course), than the 1st Option which, by definition, is tuned to a certain production rate to profitably meet the minimum economic mix.
This 2nd approach is generally more manageable as the focus is in defined work cells and production lines but still requires an overall strategic vision of the future state process with a much more detailed understanding of the current state as much more of the current state will survive the transformation, whether manual or automated.
The attributes of this approach are:
Benefits of 2nd Option:
Challenges of 2nd Option:
In Summary:
The Industry 4.0 siren calls not withstanding, the implementation of manufacturing automation is acquiring a sense of urgency. Not because of the hype but simply because the US manufacturing base has been long neglected of any significant capital investments for reasons more related to Global trade agreements as well as the strategic exportation of manufacturing starting in the 1980's.
If there is an imperative, as there appears to be, that some if not most of the manufacturing base be rebuilt, then the labor-capital ratio of manufacturing needs to be reduced from where it was in the 1980s as that's neither possible nor economically viable on a globally competitive basis. This fundamental determination of the correct labor-capital ratio will of-course vary by industry and other factors but that calculation should not be muddled with the “Industry 4.0” hype.
Industrial Revolutions happen in the background, they rarely come pre-announced!
Humans will remain in the manufacturing loop for a long time going forward. The purpose of manufacturing automation is to reduce operator and manufacturing worker skill levels not eliminate the workers and replace them with hard to find higher skilled workers.
.. but in the mean time, there's real manufacturing that needs to be done!
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It's good to always have humans in the loop!