Category Archives: Automation

Forbes

The Cycle, Not Automation, Is Keeping Oil & Gas Hiring Down Forbes By MARK AGERTON. Despite recent increases in oil and gas activity, some doubt that employment in the sector will ever reach the highs of 2014 again. Producers have been cutting costs and increasing productivity, partly thanks to an increased deployment ...

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The Cycle, Not Automation, Is Keeping Oil & Gas Hiring Down - Forbes

Workplace automation is a source of uncertainty in contemporary politics and economics, looming large in the future while we shakily chart a path towards it in the present. It's safe to say this uncertainty comes with more than a pinch of anxiety: Over the 38 percent of US jobs that will be "lost to automation" as a PwC report claimed, or the driving jobs that will be "all but obsolete" within decades.

That's why it's surprisingin a very welcome wayto hear Michael Chui, partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, argue that automation is not a threat, but rather a necessity in order for countries around the world to meet their growth and development goals.

Over the past two years, Chui and his co-authors have been collecting data from government agencies across the world about workforce demographics, wage rates, and technological adoption, as well as surveying a wealth of academic literature and other McKinsey studies. The resulting analysis was compiled into a report titled A Future That Works, published earlier this year, and has been expanded into a series of articles across various platforms, including a recent feature in Harvard Business Review on the countries most and least likely to be affected by automation.

One of the findings of the research is that regardless of whether countries have fat or lean economies and youthful or aging populations, automation is far more likely to bring net benefits than losses, albeit for different reasons.

"As countries age they have a lower ratio of workers to people who need to be supported, and as a result we simply need more productivity per hour worked. For countries lower on the GDP per capita scale with aging populations this still holds," Chui said in a phone call.

Initially, Chui and his co-authors had believed that for countries with younger populations such as India or Mexico, widespread automation would occur just as large numbers of humans were joining the workforce, leading to competition and suboptimal outcomesbut in fact, they concluded this was not the case.

"What we actually found was, those countries are lower on the GDP per capita scale, so their aspirations for economic growth are still high," said Chui. "So even for young countries, with all those young people working plus the robots, you still need more productivity for them to reach their growth aspirations."

An upshot of this is that while much of the discussion around automation has focused on the idea of an ensuing labor surplus, in reality a labor deficit is more likely, which should be reflected by our policy responses in the present.

"Rather than aiming to manage for mass unemployment, we really need to make decisions that allow for mass redeployment of labor, so that all the people can be working with all the machines to give us economic growth," Chui said.

He also stresses that we can see this kind of redeployment historically in the transition from agriculture to industry, where the technology that displaced jobs also created new ones, and investment from both the public and private sectors helped workers retrain.

"People think this is unprecedented, but it's precedented!" Chui said. "Having a double digit percentage of jobs in the economy change in a few decades did happen, and we don't have 35 percent unemployment from the early 1900s 'til now."

Even if, from a personal standpoint, aspects of our working lives seem to be changing fast, Chui also points out that macro level societal changes move far more slowly.

"It will take quite a while for all this to happen, so there will be time to adapt as we adopt," he said.

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Old And Young Populations Need Automation, But for Different Reasons - Motherboard

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By Eran Barak, CEO, Hexadite

Network World | May 9, 2017 2:22 PM PT

This vendor-written tech primerhas beenedited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, butreaders should note it will likely favor the submitters approach.

A recent Network World article argued that automated threat detection (TD) is more important than automated incident response (IR). But the piece was predicated on flawed and misguided information.

The article shared an example of a financial institution in which analysts investigated 750 alerts per month only to find two verified threats. The piece claimed that, in this scenario, automated IR could only be applied to the two verified threat instances, therefore making automated threat detection upstream a more important capability by orders of magnitude.

The problem with this assertion, however, is that automated IR can do more than just take remediation action once a threat is verified. Automated IR can be applied to each and every one of the alerts TD systems produce, pinpoint the verified threats, and take action to remediate them. In fact, it is because TD systems often return so many false positive alerts, that IR automation is experiencing a distinct surge in popularity right now.

In an ESG survey of 100 IT and cybersecurity professionals, more than half (62%) indicated they have already taken action to automate their IR processes. Another 35% reported they are either currently engaged in a project to do so, or plan to initiate an IR automation project within 18 months.

Perhaps the most valuable benefit of automated IR is it assumes the critical role of trained cyber analysts. Unlike humans, however, the technology can thoroughly investigate and respond to the constant onslaught of alerts produced by TD systems at scale, providing a much-needed solution to the chronic and rampant issue of alert fatigue. Its an unfortunate reality, but most organizations have too many TD alerts to properly investigate. They dont have adequate staffing to follow-up on alerts, and in order to act on even just a small percentage of severe/critical alerts, organizations require ample resources to first classify and prioritize the alerts and investigate every one of them.

According to research from EMA, 92% of organizations receive up to 500 alerts per day. A wide majority (68%) of research participants said they suffer from some sort of staffing impact to their security teams, and larger organizations reported collecting gigabytes to terabytes of data each day. It should come as no surprise then, that EMA found that 88% of organizations were able to investigate just 25 or fewer severe/critical events per day, with a mere 1% of severe/critical alerts ever being investigated.

So, yes, automated TD is certainly important to incorporate into cybersecurity workflows anything that can be done to reduce the number of false alerts will help in the long run. But it shouldnt be considered more important than automated IR, which today can help investigate the crushing volume of alerts, and do so at scale.

The only viable approach to keeping up with automated TD systems and the massive amount of information they deliver -- especially for organizations with limited resources -- is to stop prioritizing alerts to match capacity and instead leverage security automation tools that can investigate and remediate every alert in real-time.

To maintain business security without impacting the bottom line, organizations should seek out solutions that can automatically collect contextual information from other network detection systems or logs. They should also use known threat information and automated inspection capabilities to exonerate and incriminate threats, and fully automate their remediation process so that once a verdict has been made, a file is immediately quarantined, a process is killed, or a CNC connection is shut down.

The sooner organizations recognize that a human approach to TD and IR is unsustainable, the better. Equally crucial is acknowledging that more information (i.e. automated TD) isnt a blanket solution for effectively fighting cybercrime. With rising threat volumes and a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, organizations need to look to artificial intelligence and automation throughout the threat lifecycle and leverage integrated solutions that continually investigate every single TD alert. In doing so, companies stand to boost employee productivity, gain a greater contextual understanding of their security data, drive impactful remediation action and mitigate cyber threats in real-time.

Barak is CEO and Co-Founder of the security automation company, Hexadite. Prior to founding Hexadite he was the Head of Elbit Systems Ltd.'s Cyber Training and Simulation Team, training analysts to respond to cyber threats in both private and public sectors, and served five years in an elite intelligence unit of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

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Threat detection automation won't solve all your problems - Network World

There's a widely held and erroneous perception that industrial automation is job killer, but in reality, it's quite the opposite, said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3).

A3 recently released a whitepaper titled Working in the Automation Age: Sustainable Careers Today and into the Future, which discredits the theory that automation hurts jobs and promotes how modern men and women can find more meaningful, safer and more enjoyable work.

The hysterical stories keep being printed in the media, but the robot we see doesn't match the idea of robots being a job killer, said Burnstein. If it were true, then if robot sales were to rise, you'd expect unemployment to rise. We looked at a twenty year period of manufacturing jobs and overall employment in the US and every time robot sales rose, unemployment fell. Every time robot sales fell, unemployment rose.

Burnstein explains how the robotics industry today is seeing its greatest expansion since the invention of industrial robotics in the 1960s.

In the past seven years there were 137,000 robots delivered in the US, said Burnstein. Publicly available studies tell us that as robot use accelerates manufacturing jobs will decline, but guess what? Nearly 900,000 new manufacturing jobs were created during that period. That doesn't sound like a job killer.

A3 approached customers like General Motors (GM), who despite investing heavily into industrial robots, added 25,000 more staff, Burnstein added. Amazon was also approached, having added 40,000 industrial robot units to their fleet, along with 100,000 new humans.

The significant issue we should be worried about may be labor shortages, as manufacturers struggle to find skilled replacements for retiring baby boomers who are technologically savvy enough for modern machinery and automation.

We have examples of companies who have invested in automation to solve the problem of dull, dirty and dangerous jobs, lowered their costs, won new business they wouldn't have otherwise and since they've automated, they've hired more people, Burnstein said.

Some manufacturers require skills that aren't really being taught. Our whitepaper talks about how we need to break the mold of going to high school to college to looking for a job and accumulating all that debt. These jobs are mostly hands on, where you can get a certificate out of technical school or community college and become very valuable as a robot operator, installer or by doing maintenance of the technology.

For more information, watch the video above and read A3's whitepaper on their website.

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VIDEO: How Industrial Automation Promotes Job Growth - ENGINEERING.com

Quartz

These workers have the most automated job in America, and they say they wouldn't have it any other way Quartz Fears that automation technology will impact jobs in industries like banking and law are fairly new. But many occupations, like engraver, have already been transformed by automation. Back in 2007, when the Department of Labor last surveyed the ...

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These workers have the most automated job in America, and they say they wouldn't have it any other way - Quartz

Automation is suffocatingly ubiquitous, or it seems that way when you scan business news. In fact, it is still a new technology that is slowly integrating into everyday work. Of course, we are all familiar with the high-profile applications of automation in marketing and sales, but what about the other near-limitless applications?

What about automation in industries like tourism and education? And what about the specific functions like communication, human resources (ironic), and operations? The world is less automated than it appears, though the adoption trendline is certainly steep.

The problem is that many small businesses are not aware that they need to be proactive in adopting automation practices. While there will be out of the box solutions to buy eventually, surviving the automation wave will require proactively seeking out ways to be competitive with the technology.

So how can a small business owner identify the areas of their business where automation can make an impact? How do you know if your company even needs it? How do you know if your competitors are going to use it? Lets talk about the minutia of automation in plain terms and discuss three ways it can give your business a competitive advantage.

Any repeatable task can be automated. Whether that is filling out a form, sending a scheduled email, or booking an appointment, it can probably be done faster by a computer.

One of the first things a small business owner should do when looking for areas to be competitive with automation is to identify repetition. Computers can be taught to emulate and repeat just as well or better than people. One of the biggest differences is the speed with which they can accomplish tasks.

Michael Cohan, founder, and CEO of Unisource National Lender Services puts it this way, Loan processing has completely changed as a result of machine learning and automation. Lenders use automation technologies to improve efficiency in myriad ways, from auto-filling paperwork to aggregating information. The result is that loans process faster much faster.

In the lending industry, speed is a competitive advantage. Speed is a competitive edge in every industry, so small business owners need to look around and identify what could be working faster.

How do you calculate cost savings? When we talk about saving money through automation, the first thing people think of is fewer salaries. But that is not always the only or biggest savings.

Money can be saved (and earned) by accomplishing work faster, making fewer mistakes, and winning more business. In a very grand sense, it is also cheaper than being pushed out of business by more technologically advanced competitors. If you look at your industry and see the automation wave coming, that could be the cost of inaction.

Small business owners need to make a hard assessment of the cost of not using automation. Costly clerical errors can add up to thousands of dollars in losses even for small companies. Slow turn around time on projects means the business has to pay salaries for longer while making lower revenue. These little areas of improvement are where automation shines.

The expression work smarter, not harder is objectively overused and frequently misused. In the case of automation, it is reasonably appropriate. Many clerical jobs require people to repeatedly fill out the same forms over and over again. Performing that task is time-consuming and small human errors can result in substantial problems everything from costly delays to lost clients.

Cohan explains, The ability to rapidly process paperwork makes every business more competitive, but certainly companies that deal in large volumes of paperwork. A lending company with a well-designed automation function is extremely competitive. They can issue loans faster with a higher degree of certainty that they are done properly.

Every industry has an application for automation. If your competitors are exploiting it, you need to get on board quickly. If they are not, you may have the opportunity to race ahead of the pack as an early adopter.

Automation Photo via Shutterstock

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How The Automation Wave Will Help Small Business - Small Business Trends

Brexit. Trump. Cybersecurity. Skills gap.Customer demands. These and other factors loom large as influencers on manufacturers and their automation decisions, and there remains a lot of uncertainty tied up with much of it. Trends already underway will help shape decisions, but how exactly everything will play out is still unknown.

Brexit: Toosoon to know British citizens decided in a referendum vote last year to withdraw from the European Uniona move commonly referred to as Brexit. The UK government began the official withdrawal process in late March this year, so a great deal is still unknown about what sort of trade deals the UK will be able to develop on its own or what other effects Brexit will have on the country.

Its a dangerous game to jump too soon to predictions about the eventual impact of Brexit, notes Glynn Westbury, managing director at UK-based system integrator Westbury Control Systems. We may have voted decisively as a country, but not a lot since then has really been actioned or implemented, he says.

The effect of Brexit remains to be seen, agrees Caralynn Nowinski Collens, CEO of UI Labs, a manufacturing technology incubator based in Chicago. Manufacturing in the country got a boost in 2016, ending the year stronga surprise to many concerned about the effects of Brexit.

The uncertainty itself, however, has had an impact on UK businesses, Westbury says. Since the referendum, this factor has created some temporary issues with workflow, whereby clients have held back or hesitated in finalizing the approvals for projects to move forward. Consequently, managing our workflow can be a challenge, he says. Indecision and a drop in confidence makes doing business less straightforward.

And along with that uncertainty has come cost increases from European suppliers, Westbury adds. Some of the kits that we buy ready to assemble in our control panels have had price increases beyond the regular, annual increment. So far, Westbury has absorbed the increase, but it is inevitable that those additional rises in costs will, at some point, have to be passed on to our customers.

Collens points to possible storm clouds on the horizon in the form of inflationary risk and a slowdown in investment from companies in European countries that decide to take a wait-and-see approach as Brexit nears. That said, she continues, despite the political events, it appears that the countrys investment in advanced manufacturing and materials continues to attract companies that see benefits from operating within the UK.

On the positive side for U.S. companies doing business overseas, a drop in the value of the British pound should bring benefits, Westbury notes. Feedback from American clients has been openly positive, anticipating that Westbury will be more competitive for many of its overseas contracts, he says.

The Trumpquestion Donald Trumps inauguration this year as U.S. president has brought quite a lot of change already, but many companies are still waiting to see how new policies enacted by the administration might affect operations.

I don't know that anybody really knows what to expect from Trump, says Laura Studwell, industry marketing manager at Omron Automation Americas. Most companies, I think, are just kind of sitting back and saying, Okay, let's see how this plays out for a little bit longer before we make decisions that could potentially have an impact on our operation.

Tom OReilly, vice president of global business development for Rockwell Automation, is on the same page with Studwell. I would say you are hearing things now, he says. I wouldn't say we are seeing things.

Based on what President Trump has said that he would like to have happen, Westbury sees potential benefit from the new administrations focus on conventional energy spending, and his customers agree. Inevitably, the demand for their technology and business is likely to increase in response to Trumps objective to rebuild the U.S. energy provision, including the use of fossil fuels, Westbury says. Generally speaking, conservative politics are usually beneficial to business. At Westbury, we are optimistic that a Trump presidency will bolster our existing U.S.-influenced client relationships and their business that demands our services.

Collens sees it from a less political stance. Fortunately, manufacturing is a bipartisan issue, so we expect to see continued federal support for technological advancement and job creation in the industry, she says. She sees continued government support for advanced manufacturing as crucial to that effort, and shes hopeful that the new president will agree. President Trump has expressed his enthusiasm for bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States, and we hope that hell recognize the importance of continued federal support for institutes like ours in order to do that.

Securityconcerns Cybersecurity is at the top of many manufacturers list of concerns, and is directly related to the continued push toward the kind of advanced manufacturing that Collens advocates, including the Internet of Things (IoT). As you have intelligent assets, as you have greater connectivity, you're opening the electronic door to potential [security] issues, OReilly explains. If someone hacks into your industrial control system, they could wreak havoc on your manufacturing line. We spend a lot of time talking with our customers about security.

John Kowal, director of business development at B&R Industrial Automation, a member of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), is blunt on the security risk to connected automation. We wont have IoT until the security issue is solved or successfully addressed, he says. Its just not going to happen. Were not going to plug things in until theyre secure enough that corporations feel comfortable putting those assets out where they could be potentially hacked.

Cybersecurity is top of mind for end users and suppliers, particularly as the manufacturing industry continues to digitize, Collens affirms. There are tremendous efficiency gains to be made by connecting the full product lifecycle using data, but with that comes a heightened need to guard against cyber attacks.

Collens cites a report from 2016 by consultancy firm BDO showing that 92 percent of manufacturers surveyed share cybersecurity concerns. That percentage is up from 44 percent of manufacturers in 2013. The fears are not unfounded. According to 2015 data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a third of cyber attacks to infrastructure were against the manufacturing sector. The attacks led all other infrastructure attacks, and the number of attacks was more than double those on the next hardest hit sectorenergy.

New cybersecurity rules from the U.S. government are also driving cybersecurity investments, Collens says. Federal contracts are at stake for companies that dont comply with new rules in the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) that are scheduled to go into effect in December 2017.

From any perspective, whether from the business or operations side of manufacturing, or from a regulatory standpoint, security concerns will only continue to grow, and must be managed appropriately to enable the industry to thrive. The key to managing the cybersecurity risk, OReilly says, is understanding what the risks are, having the appropriate strategy or plan around those, and managing themputting the right security process and plan in place.

The skills gap A skills gap continues to affect hiring decisions, with no letup in sight, regardless of whatever other uncertainties might be at play. Addressing that issue, OReilly sees manufacturers in increasing numbers setting up pilot projects that can develop best practices around technologies and the skills needed to operate them. Starting on that scale, they prove out the technology [and] that people have the right skillsets, he says. From there, successful pilots can be rolled out from the whole facility, and at a broader scale across the country and globally.

The Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII), part of UI Labs, has a partnership with Coursera to develop specialized online classes for digital manufacturing and design. We are seeing companies interested in hiring, but understanding the types of roles they need can be a challenge, Collens says. The online courses help expose younger learners and current shop-floor workers to digital manufacturing and design technologies.

Since good workers can be hard to come by, Westbury is among manufacturers placing a premium on reducing employee turnover. In a sector with an engineer and technician shortage, Westbury takes a more proactive role in filling that skills gap, he says. An apprenticeship program at Westbury cultivates skilled workers while enabling them to earn college degrees. Consistency among workers rather than flexibility in staffing, Westbury says, is a priority.

Global shifts drive automation No matter what happens on the political scene, globalization and evolving consumer demands will continue to shape investments in manufacturing now and in the foreseeable future, Studwell contends. Flexibility and standardization are the bywords now and to come, she says. Standardization of equipment is crucial for OEMs, she adds, so that they can supply and support multiple markets. At the same time, demand for consumer packaged goods continues to diversify.

What you're seeing is moving away from customization and going to personalization. I call it SKU proliferation, Studwell says, citing as an example Element Bars, which offer the ability to customize meal bars that are then manufactured and shipped to consumers on demand. For on-demand manufacturing, everything's got to be automated, she says.

Westbury, too, sees no slowdown in manufacturings relentless pace toward automation. Currently, an ongoing initiative to reduce our manufacturing waste means that some of our manual tasks over time will become more automated, he says. We dont think this will mean employing less staff at Westbury. Instead, the people we employ will not be burdened with the low-skill, repetitive tasks, which are suitable for automation. Westburys customers, as well, are continuing with automation plans, as evidenced by new orders for control panels for robotics projects, he adds.

No matter what, it seems, automation will only grow in importance as time goes on, despite any political or economic upheavals on the horizon. Regardless of political trends, technology is progressing rapidly, and the industry has much to gain through improving digital capabilities, Collens says. She believes that the manufacturers UI Labs serves will proceed with technology investments. They certainly hope that political and trade trends remain favorable to the sector, but technological advancement will benefit them individuallyand the industry at largeregardless.

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Global Economic Shifts Bring Uncertainty in Automation - Automation World

Image: iStockphoto/NicoElNino

Automate or die seems to be the message for IT leaders. Some 89% of tech pros said that IT automation must be used in new ways to achieve digital business objectives, according to a new survey from BMC Software.

Further, 73% of IT decision makers said they believe that businesses that do not embrace IT automation in digital transformation strategies within the next five years will no longer exist in 10 years.

Half of respondents said that digital transformation is the largest item on IT's agenda, and 45% said it represents the largest investment of any IT program. Demands for new sources of revenue, competitive advantages, and operational excellence have created enormous pressure to compete digitally in order to earn the trust of customers, trading partners, and employees, 92% of tech professionals agreed.

The survey included responses from more than 650 IT decision makers across 12 countries. Some 94% of these professionals reported that they expect automation to spread from IT departments into all areas of business by 2020, to keep pace with the digital business innovation race that every industry is currently competing in.

SEE: Digital Transformation: A CXO's Guide (ZDNet)

Containerization, workload automation/scheduling, and DevOps were the top three areas of investment priority for the tech leaders surveyed over the next 24 months, BMC Software found.

"As companies continue to incorporate hybrid cloud capabilities across the digital enterprise, they are challenged by the complexity of managing workloads across public and private clouds," said Gur Steif, president of digital business automation at BMC, in a press release. "IT teams must be able to manage the customer value chain in spite of decentralized usage of cloud services. This is requiring a new level of IT automation to adapt to the challenges posed by increasingly diverse infrastructure, disparate data, and accelerated applications - the critical components of digital business."

Enterprises face a number of other digital transformation challenges as well, the survey found. Some 42% of CIOs surveyed said they believe business units still have conflicting objectives, and 32% said their company needs tighter internal organizational alignment.

However, 88% of IT leaders surveyed said they believe they are empowered to deliver the necessary IT innovation to drive digital transformation efforts. And 77% said they believe businesses are doing enough to prepare and train the workforce with greater automation skills. Meanwhile, 76% of respondents said they consider themselves excellent or very good at using data to deliver tangible business outcomes for a competitive advantage.

1. As more businesses undergo digital transformation efforts, 89% of IT decision makers said that IT automation must be used in new ways to achieve digital business objectives, according to a new survey from BMC Software.

2. Further, 73% of IT decision makers said they believe that businesses that do not embrace IT automation in digital transformation strategies within the next five years will no longer exist in 10 years.

3. Half of respondents said that digital transformation is the largest item on IT's agenda, and 45% said it represents the largest investment of any IT program.

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89% of tech pros say IT automation is necessary for digital transformation - TechRepublic

In Brief As automation pushes forward, robots are being designed for just about everything. Now, one startup has developed a robot that will be able to pick apples "at rates that match crews of tens of people." A New Wave of Robots

We are living in the age of automation. Robots are capable of handling tasks previously reserved forlawyers,doctors, shoe manufacturers, and just about every profession in between. And now,Abundant Robotics, a startupdeveloping leading edge robots for agriculture, has created a robot that picks apples.

The inspiration for theinvention came as a result of the current political landscape. The focus onimmigration policy has left many worried that there simply wont be enough immigrant workers to meet the demand. The growing trend of fewer people working on farms has led to quite an issue with production, and apples obviously cant be sold if theyre never picked.

This led Abundant Robotics to develop arobot that can, according to CEO and co-founder Dan Steere, identify, pluck, and place apples into a crate with roughly the same accuracy and care asa human. However, unlike a human, a robot doesnt need to eat or sleep, and it can work at, well, inhuman speeds. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Steere has even said, Our commercial system will pick at rates that match crews of tens of people.

Some may see this development as cause for concern, another example of automation leading to job loss. And yes, as more and more robots capable of human action are developed, we might be replaced, in a way. However, while increased automation could lead toproblems that we are looking for solutions to, a lot of good will come with it as well.

Robots often make life safer. From the operating table to the harsh conditions of working on a farm, robotic replacements could increase productivity while reducing risk. If we promote research, new jobs will follow, and if we emphasize education funding, current citizens and those immigrating to the U.S. will be able to take advantage of those alternative work opportunities.

So long as we keep promoting progress in a way that helps humanity as a whole, positive change will follow. Steere puts it into historical perspective: Look at the history of agriculture going back to the 1800s. Machinery has changed how harvestings done, and huge benefits to society have come from that.

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The Next Step in Automation? A Robot That Picks Apples - Futurism

As a brand name, UniCarriers is less than a decade old, dating only back to 2011. However, the companys lineage dates back more than a century to 1914, when one of the companies now included under the UniCarriers nameBarrett, a manufacturer of manual pallet truckswas founded. And Nissan Forklift, whose U.S. headquarters occupied the same Marengo, Ill.-based plant where UniCarriers Americas Corp. (UCA) is now based, was founded 60 years ago in Japan. And TCM, under company thats now part of UniCarriers, began manufacturing forklifts in Japan in 1949. Clearly, a lot of the material handling history over the years has been made by UniCarriers under one name or another.

James Radous has been president of UCA, a subsidiary of Japan-based UniCarriers Corp., since 2016, having previously served in such roles as president of UCAs retail operations and executive vice president of sales. Prior to joining UCA in 2009, he worked for such companies as Knaack (a division of Emerson), Klein Tools, Wen Products, and The Chamberlain Group.

As a manufacturer with ties to the Japanese automotive industry, UCA is both dedicated to continuous improvement and working very collaboratively with its suppliers, as UCA considers its supply chain partners to be one of its biggest competitive advantages. For instance, one of its suppliers, Leading Americas, has established warehouse operations in Marengo, the same small Midwestern town where UCA is headquartered.

IndustryWeek talked to Radous about UCAs legacy as a U.S. material handling equipment provider, as well as its move toward automation while strengthening the capabilities of its workforce.

IndustryWeek: UniCarriers has been successful in attracting some of your suppliers to Marengo. How did that come about?

Radous: We bought a facility across the street from us about four years ago, a former packaging and corrugation company that moved to Mexico. So right across the street from us was a facility, roughly 120,000 square feet, and it affords us areas not only to do testing, but weve also brought the engine and the transmission manufacturing in house to be vertically integrated. Doing so, we also had space available for some of our longer lead time parts suppliers out of China and weve rented them space so they have an on-site office. And we also have on-site parts storage, which functions almost like a vendor-managed inventory operation. Its pretty neat.

IW: Describe what UniCarriers continuous improvement culture looks like.

Radous: On Fridays, the executive team does a shop walk around the plant. Well visit one or two workstations where the supervisor or a member of their team will present an idea or a solution theyve come up with. Theyre all good ideas, and theyre all cost savings ideas that the employees themselves have thought about. For instance, one person might say, I used to have to go get this one piece of equipment here and then walk over there and Id do this 400 times a day. But I know if I can get this machine redesigned, itll save me this amount of hours a day and that translates into this amount of dollars. So people themselves are thinking of initiatives and theyre justifying their position and how theyre showing a return on investment just by thinking outside the box. Its huge.

We have a big award ceremony once a year, and youd be amazed by how what might seem like simple ideas, over the course of time, accumulate into quite a lot of savings and keep us cost-competitive internally. Instead of beating up suppliers all the time, were internally creating more efficiencies.

Also, we just received the OHSAS 18001 certification for occupational health and safety. And weve also received the ISO 9001 for quality management and the ISO 14001 for environmental management. And we do a lot of lean. We used to employ the Nissan Production Way, which is now the UniCarriers Production Way, and thats been part of the DNA of the organization for a long time.

IW: Whats your strategy in terms of manufacturing technology and automation?

Radous: We had a third party do a complete manufacturing review of our business to determine how we can be most efficient, even though we run a pretty efficient plant today. So theyve recommended different traffic flows, new dock locations, better flow-through of raw materials as well as finished goods. So were looking at that. So weve got, number one, a redesign for growth. Number two, weve invested in laser cutting tables. Number three, were using robotic welders as well as human welders, and were also using manipulators.

So heres the thing: By adding automation weve been able to redeploy our workforce to other areas, so we havent cut workforce. Thats been our commitment to our employees. We have committed to them that theyre not going to lose their jobs because of our adoption of automation and robotics. Yes, they might be redeployed or reeducated into other areas, but its not an employee reduction plan.

So our employees arent afraid of technology anymore because they know its not taking their spot; in fact, its making their jobs easier and safer.

IW: Speaking of safety, you recently served as the chair of National Forklift Safety Day, so whats your message to the industry on the current state of warehouse safety? What does the industry need to focus on?

Radous: Safety is every day. We highlight it one day of the year, but we need to reinforce safety every day. And the thing about safety is, its everybodys jobthe owners, the managers, the employees, the pedestrians. We cant take these machines for granted. And youre never done with safety. Every time we redesign one of our forklift products we look to add another safety feature. And that isnt dictated through regulationsits just what we think is the right thing to do.

IW: How does ergonomics factor into safety?

Radous: Seat ergonomics is the first thing I would mention. There are different shapes and sizes that people use in the products. While you can make it ergonomically desirable, you still cannot circumvent the safety aspect. We continually look at ergonomics.

IW: How successful have you been at recruiting young talent?

Radous: Weve actually hired a number of interns over the last several years who have turned into full-time employees in our engineering and accounting areas from Northern Illinois University. Weve gotten very involved with their engineering department. We went to their recruitment day, and we had 200 resumes that we vetted down to 40 who are now actively working with us.

We brought our youngest and our brightest mechanical and electrical engineers to the recruitment fair, the types of young people who make this industry look great, and they showed the recruits the type of things theyre working on. And they would tell the recruits, These arent just forkliftsthis is the heart of commerce. Were where everything begins. And these students just couldnt wait to see for themselves. Were trying to make this industry fun and exciting again. So thats where it begins.

Originally posted here:

UniCarriers Commits to its Employees as it Commits to Automation - IndustryWeek