Manufacturing in the Age of Automation and Simulation

For many businesses, 2023 has been a tough year, and those in the manufacturing industry have been afforded no exception. Inflation has continued to drive up the prices of commodities and purchased components. At the same time, higher interest rates have started to temper customer demand and increased financial pressure for businesses operating on credit.

The solution for many is to offshore more manufacturing to countries with lower labor rates, but is this the only solution?

Indeed, there are many reasons to keep manufacturing operations local, perhaps none greater than minimizing shipping costs, as well as the associated environmental footprint.

The key to avoiding the need for offshore manufacturing involves desensitizing manufacturing operations from labor costs. The rapid development of automation is helping with this.

Until recently, automation has been tainted by long setup times, frequent adjustment to environmental conditions, and high costs to introduce and maintain.

For example, a simple MIG welding operation would have taken a highly bespoke control system to maintain tight control over the gap between the welding electrode and the substrate to be welded.

Furthermore, to ensure adequate quality, the welding operation may have necessitated a vision system, and often, that vision system would have been susceptible to periodic failure or frequent false negatives when consistent lighting conditions could not be maintained.

Fast forward to today, where we have reduced the cost of processing power, advanced in the field of artificial intelligence, and developed lower-cost cameras with higher resolution and faster frame rates. These advancements, along with many more, have made automation more accessible to manufacturing businesses of all sizes.

"Technology advancements in automation and simulation allow businesses to work smarter and maximize value throughout the work stream"

When coupled with an increasingly skilled labor force, these technology leaps are drastically reducing automation payback periods and affording businesses the opportunity to significantly reduce direct labor costs.

Granted, there will be some businesses that, despite the latest advancements in automation, run manufacturing processes that are simply performed better by humans. So, what role does technology play in keeping these manufacturing operations cost-competitive?

For many, the key is leveraging simulation software to strip the product and its manufacturing process down to their leanest possible forms.

Products are predominately designed by engineers who have been conditioned since their earliest training to incorporate sufficient factors of safety into their designs.

While these factors of safety are what keep bridges from collapsing and planes from falling from the sky, they can present severely negative impacts on the cost and complexity of the product.

Simulation software primarily exists as a tool for engineers to trim factors of safety without compromising safety or customer experience.

Refined factors of safety can often translate to smaller and lighter products and sometimes alternative materials. These optimizations provide a driving force to reduce the cost of raw materials and can even result in an enhanced customer experience where lighter and more compact designs are desirable product attributes.

But the benefits of simulation software are not limited to product design, it is becoming increasingly favorable to leverage across manufacturing process design.

Manufacturing engineers are employing increasingly powerful simulation software to model processes to minimize scrap, accelerate cycle times, and improve the uptime of machines - all contributing to reducing operations costs.

The sophistication of simulation software, together with exponential growth in processing speeds, is enabling manufacturers to model the performance of an entire factory before the first equipment is even purchased. This is true even in industries as complex as automotive manufacturing, where there are hundreds of robots working together in tandem.

So-called 'digital twins' are enabling greater utilization of robots and other machines, thereby reducing the total quantity of such equipment that needs to be procured to meet target production volumes.

The need to offshore manufacturing operations to countries with low labor rates is becoming an antiquated solution. Technology advancements in automation and simulation allow businesses to work smarter and maximize value throughout the work stream.