But GM’s “lights out” experiment was a mess. Production costs in the factory of the future exceeded those in plants employing thousands of unionized workers. In several facilities, the robots struggled to distinguish one car model from another: They tried to affix Buick bumpers to Cadillacs, and vice versa. The robots were bad painters, too; they spray-painted one another rather than the cars coming down the line. GM shut the Saginaw plant in 1992.
The costs of switching over an automated system to do something new are frequently much higher than switching over a team of human workers. In this article, we introduce the concept of positive-sum automation, which we’ve defined as the design and deployment of new technologies that improve productivityflexibility. Positive-sum automation depends on designing technology that makes it easier for line employees to train and debug robots; using a bottom-up approach to identifying what tasks should be automated; and choosing the right metrics for measuring success.
When a robot’s external conditions change—which they inevitably do, as when a firm wants to update its production process or begin producing a new version of a product—the automated system needs to be reprogrammed, retested, and retaught. The costs of switching over an automated system to do something new are frequently much higher than switching over a team of human workers.
Start-ups and research labs are now focusing on low-code automation software that can assist a line employee in configuring and troubleshooting a robot. Other low-code tools empower robots to learn new multistep tasks from a human expert. The human demonstrates the process for the robot, which watches and learns. When it is ready to perform the task, the human observes the process to ensure that the robot is doing it properly.
Ohio-based G&T Manufacturing began a similar transformation in 2016. The 20-person factory produces a variety of parts for industries ranging from aerospace to agriculture. Its employees were once tasked with physically moving 40-pound machine parts into and out of a lathe that cuts and shapes the metal parts, repeating the process many times an hour. G&T wanted to automate that manual labor task.
That's the new evolution in all the companies, get new technology that helps to attend the clients in a short time, like a app , AI etc
That makes sense but I'd be willing to bet process flexibility was something they took into consideration when determining automations. Quite possibly analyzed before chosen.
This is simply hilarious because we all know IT based their purchasing decisions on how cheap they can get it for (preferably free) and not how it makes life easier for employees. Otherwise, how do you explain MS Teams and Skype for Business, for example?
Process change to go hand in hand