It is easy to think about manufacturing automation as a direct replacement for human labor. In the ways I speak and think about automation, I am apt to succumb to this framing myself. But in real-world manufacturing, applications of automation rarely fit this description.
I filmed this video in Tokod, Hungary. The location is a Feintool production plant making rotors and stators for electric motors. Feintool is a global high-volume metal part producer with plants in various parts of Europe—Switzerland, Germany, Czechia, Hungary—as well as around the world.
Relative to the locations in Europe, Hungary is a lower-labor-cost region. If the purpose of automation is to replace labor, then we would expect the plants in higher-labor-cost areas to rely on automation while the low-labor-cost plants rely on labor instead.
That is not the case for Feintool. The company has robots and other automation systems in use here in Hungary, as well as throughout its operations, in all the regions in which it produces.
In this video, the robot cell performs brushing of rotors for AC induction motors to remove excess material after metal casting. Humans could do the flash removal, but there is a distinctly tight tolerance on the processing of this particular part.
And I see that crucial detail getting at the real role of manufacturing automation and what purpose the robot cell serves. Whether labor cost is low or high, the primary role of automation is to perform operations a human cannot do well.
Robots and other manufacturing automation are good at consistency in terms of accuracy, repeatability, and steadiness of production rate. Humans are poor at this.
Humans are good at flexibility, adaptability and responding correctly when signals are ambiguous or subject to change. Robots are not suited to this.
Thus, adding automation is not a means to do the same work a different way, with machines replacing people. Anyone analyzing automation this way is likely missing its point.
Adding automation is instead the way to expand the possibilities for what the plant can do. The right mix of team members plus automated systems opens the way for production to be responsive, productive, efficient and tightly repeatable all at once.
