Automation seen boosting production

AUTO PILOT: Yushin America Inc. not only makes robot arms that plastics companies use to automate their factories, it uses automation in its own manufacturing. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
AUTO PILOT: Yushin America Inc. not only makes robot arms that plastics companies use to automate their factories, it uses automation in its own manufacturing. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

Each night when the lights go out, eight of the 53 machines at Swissline Precision Manufacturing in Cumberland keep running after all the employees have gone home.
This “lights-out” shift, as fully automated production is known in the industry, is made possible by advances in robotics and computers that can now replace many of the more routine tasks that used to require humans.
Even if they don’t run lights out, most manufacturers in Rhode Island have adopted some level of automation, especially since the explosion in computer-processing power and increased globalization of the last two decades.
“We have been automating for many years and it has been refined to the point where now we can run machines at night unattended,” said Swissline President Dave Chenevert. “This lets us run certain jobs more efficiently and get other jobs out in a more timely manner. It cuts lead time.”
Paradoxically, Chenevert said the primary thing preventing him from running with even more automation is an inability to find workers who can program and run the new advanced machines efficiently.
Swissline could add up to seven new workers and another shift at its factory – which makes parts on contract for medical device and aerospace companies – Chenevert said, if it could find qualified applicants.
“It’s the skills-gap issue that exists in getting people into the manufacturing industry,” Chenevert said. “I don’t think the general public has a clue what we are about and what is required to get into our career path. We are willing to train people [in] how to run these machines, but we need a certain base level of skills.”
Across the country, the automation of traditional factories has been hailed for boosting productivity and lamented for hastening the loss of low-skilled, blue-collar jobs.
Rhode Island, like much of the United States, has seen manufacturing employment shrink steadily for decades.
In August, there were 40,000 manufacturing jobs in the state, less than half the total in 1994 and the 95,000 manufacturing jobs in August 1990, according to statistics from the R.I. Department of Labor and Training. Automation has played a part in those shrinking numbers, but not as much as competition from places, first in the United States and then abroad, with lower labor costs.
Now Rhode Island manufacturing executives say efficient, skillful use of automation and advanced technology is helping keep the factories that remain from leaving and has the potential to grow the manufacturing base.
“Over the long run [automation] is a net job-positive, because it gets you more productive in the marketplace,” said Karl Wadensten, president of Vibco Vibrators in Richmond, and a member of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation board of directors. “It makes everyone knowledge workers and problem-solvers. There’s no more ‘check your brain at the door.’ We don’t have those jobs we had where you can stand there for 30 years and watch reams of fabric roll by. They have optical character-recognition software that can do a much better job.”
Perhaps reflecting national reports that the American manufacturing sector is growing again and some production that had migrated overseas may be returning, Rhode Island this year is on pace to record the first year-over-year increase in manufacturing employment in the 24 years of available state jobs numbers.
In 2012, Rhode Island averaged 39,700 manufacturing workers, according to seasonally adjusted DLT figures, while the first eight months of this year have averaged 40,200 manufacturing workers.
The increase is small, but suggests the manufacturing sector has, if not rebounded, at least reached the bottom.
Vibco has experimented with running lights out, but Wadensten said so far the cost of going to a fully robotic shop, and the expertise to make it work, have been too great. Instead, the company is doing “micro-lights-out,” running automated through lunch and for periods during the day.
With machines now able to put pieces through lathes and milling with minimal human involvement, Wadensten said the time it takes to produce a part is now half what it was and quality is near 100 percent, instead of 75 or 80 percent when done manually. Automation at Vibco, which has 98 employees, has happened gradually over the last five years and Wadensten said it would probably happen faster if the tax code offered faster depreciation of equipment or if he could fill a few open positions for engineers and machine operators.
Yushin America Inc. in Cranston has a particularly close relationship with the automation of manufacturing: it makes robot arms that plastics companies use to automate their factories.
And of course, Yushin itself uses automation in its manufacturing, in this case computer-numeric-controlled equipment, to build the automating robots.
“The robots are much more efficient and they can do a job in a more consistent manner,” said Dino Caparco, engineering-operations manager at Yushin’s Cranston plant. “A lot of times it is an issue of safety as well. The things robots do, you wouldn’t necessarily want a human to do.”
Like other industries that have been transformed by computers, the hope is that factory automation will provide opportunities at companies making robots, like Yushin, for programmers developing software for machines, or other related services.
Bill McCourt, executive director of the Rhode Island Manufacturers Association, said he feels the anxiety some have about the loss of low-end jobs to automation, but believes there’s no way to bring those jobs back.
Eventually, manufacturing needs to become associated with high-skilled jobs instead of the more manual work of the past, McCourt said. This will help manufacturers attract the talent that so many say they can’t find to move their companies forward.
“It is difficult that the investment in machinery may not always mean the addition of new jobs and people would argue that automation eliminates some jobs at low end” McCourt said. “But what this is enabling is the skill levels to get ratcheted up each day, along with the pay and benefits, so these positions become attractive.” •

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