“Robots will kill jobs!”
“Think of our families, the children!”
“Oh, the humanity!”
At first glance, the brouhaha over the rise of robots in our supply chains, including manufacturing is understandable. However, it doesn’t help when the protests are spearheaded by those on the fringe who believe that even the automation of the Industrial Age should be reversed.
There is a proper way to react to the rise of robotics and romanticizing the Luddites isn’t it. Yes, there are ethical and social implications when ‘replacing’ man with machine (and these existed even before the factory loom was invented). However, many examples exist to show how the transition to automation actually works and works well in real life.
Here is one case featuring robots now being used to serve high-quality hamburgers in this revolutionary restaurant in Pasadena, Los Angeles.
Flippy, the burger flipping robot, originally worked only during the lunch hours at Caliburger in Pasadena, and after an overwhelming introduction to the world, with an unprecedented rush of customers, which it’s said gave Flippy a case of ‘stagefright’, ‘he’ has now been retooled and is now working full time processing ‘thousands’ of burgers daily from 11.00am to 7.00pm. according to the robot’s creator, David Zito, CEO of Miso Robotics.(Read more in USA today.)
Despite the presence of the machinery, however, the restaurant continues to employ a standard-sized staff who have all been trained to work with ‘Flippy’. Better still, the staff are offered both decent wages as well as ample break time to develop other skills they wouldn’t otherwise nurture if a majority of them were consigned to burger flipping duty.
Further though, Flippy, has expanded his repertoire to include serving fast food. In mid-August he will begin his new gig cooking fried chicken tenders and tater tots at Dodger Stadium. (Read more in USA today.)
So the juggernaut rolls on and few industries will be immune. The lead times to market continue to reduce, the power and capability of the technology continues to increase to the point where it seems almost weekly there is a new set of advanced tools and technologies that we need to adopt or suffer the consequences…….
Perhaps what drives the fears and protests towards automation is really a flawed assumption about why we use machines in the first place. We must continue to think about robots and all sorts of innovative technologies as automation that will do the heavy lifting for us, allowing us to free up our time to spend on activities that we prefer, enjoy or develop us further, not humdrum repetitive tasks which lack fulfillment and satisfaction and which can hardly be the singular reason that we were put on this planet to undertake but which have evolved as a result of the industrial revolution!
So, with this in mind, what are the tasks that you (and your business team) currently do but don’t particularly enjoy? Can you turn these first into a documented set of steps, a process (or system) that you can train someone else to do? Then could this process be automated to the extent that ‘new technology’ could potentially complete the task?
Could you have the next very successful example – ‘Flippy V3’ and what might ‘Flippy V3’ be doing for you?
How many people do you employ in your organisation in roles that are repetitive, lacking in development opportunity, and humdrum and can you see why it might be sensible, even compassionate, to start seeking alternative technologies to better undertake these tasks, freeing up humankind for better things….like better utilising their creative skills, upskilling and retraining, in areas that few technologies are currently able to replicate.
Here are some further compelling reasons for making more use of automation in your end to end supply chain…..
1st Reason – Enhancing Products
Not every product is a Michelin-star dish or an exotic handicraft that automatically suffers when put through automation. In the case of other products like automobile parts, using robots and other forms of automation enable both the more efficient manufacturing and also faster development of prototypes. There’s nothing new here because it’s been happening for years!
3D printers are already seeing heavy use in engineering research departments and design and more lately being used by Boeing in their aircraft building via a joint venture with Norsk Titanium. (Norsk Titanium have developed the Rapid Plasma Deposition™ (RPD™) which has been FAA-certified, OEM-qualified additive manufacturing process that delivers structural titanium parts with reduced lead time and cost via 3d printing processes.)
Why waste hours slaving away on repetitively constructing every tiny piece when you can focus on a design and fine-tune it instead?
2nd Reason – Enhancing Workers
As painfully blunt as this might sound, there is no Bachelor’s degree in flipping hamburgers or Omelettes because even young children can do it. You can spend hours ‘honing’ that skill and you will still lose to a celebrity chef who knows how to do that and make a better hamburger or Omelette than you!
Why then should you resist the idea of a machine that does this job and frees you to enhance your culinary skills? This applies to more than just cooking. Whenever a machine successfully replicates increasingly mundane tasks, the best result is that we, humankind, is elevated to reach even higher pursuits. Instead of being consigned a seat at the conveyor belt, a factory worker can upskill/cross-skill to a task that is unlikely to ever singularly be done by a machine.
3rd Reason – Enhancing Productivity
Remember the principle of working smart instead of hard? Machines further empower us to do this because we are more productive getting more things done with the least amount of energy. Our supply chains in turn, are far more productive, because of this principle.
When we improve our purchasing, manufacturing, distribution and storage processes with technology, the result is improved productivity across the end to end supply chain. This includes in not only assisting employees to be more productive but also how the reduced cost of energy and resources will be used to further improve the business.
To summarize, the right way to react to automation in supply chains needs to be centered on the critical responsibility that we have as employers to ensure that we are:
- Providing a viable alternative in our supply chains to having employees working day in day out on mundane boring and mundane tasks, so that we, humankind, is elevated to reach even higher pursuits, retraining in areas unlikely to ever singularly be done by a machine.
- Allowing space and time for our employees to better focus on enhancing our products to better meet our customer requirements
- Driving improved performance and productivity into our supply chains which must deliver products 24 hours a day.
The future is exciting and it’s not that far away. What do you need to ensure that as a leader you are mentally prepared to embrace it along with the technological changes it will bring? Make it fun, make it exciting, make it interesting! You never know what you and your team will discover and now is the time. Don’t wait for someone else to make the change on your behalf potentially to you and your business, be your own disruption! You never know where this will lead!
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Or, maybe you would like to better understand how you can more fully leverage today’s technology in your supply chain? Click HERE for a FREE ebook. You just might discover the missing piece to get your business back in the lead where it belongs!.
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