RS Connect Insights Part 3: Skilled Labor Shortages

Scott: One example of how Banner helps customers reduce manual labor is through our lighting solutions. Our LED solutions help to provide easy visibility into machine status, as well as other key machine metrics. For example, LED lighting can be used to show overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) or the safety status of a machine, letting operators know whether they’re operating in safe conditions or not. LED lighting solutions can also help guide operators to specific areas of a machine to help them diagnose problems and get them back up and running more quickly. Additionally, they can aid in overcoming language barriers and support new employees for faster training — all through simple on-machine indications.

Pat: Festo sells customers the same products that we use to address our own in-house labor shortages, and we help train and equip customers to do the same.

Chad: Every Eaton customer is dealing with labor issues. Communications are embedded in most of our products so that customers don’t have to send a service person out to equipment sites for monitoring purposes. We have many customers in remote locations that need information to be relayed to central locations. For example, a remote gas well can send a notification via Wi-Fi to tell a customer that maintenance is required or that a breaker has tripped. We use several different platforms for wireless communication, and we’re always conscious of the information and cybersecurity within these solutions.

Pat: As an automation technologies company, we rely on our own Festo products because we have the same labor challenges and shortages that all of our customers face. We’ve had to find ways to overcome these challenges by utilizing a lot of the processes and products that we manufacture in-house to automate our operations. Through automation and electrification, we can increase our data feedback and manage our inventories and production cycles more easily while also remedying the challenges caused by labor shortages.

Chad: Yes, we do. For example, we have an Eaton facility in Puerto Rico — an area prone to hurricanes — and we have to make sure that we have automated backups in place. If a hurricane comes through, we only have to worry about our people and not our processes or the plant going down because of these backup systems. We also use remote monitoring and similar IIoT solutions to remedy labor challenges. These tools are removing the need for people to have to be physically at the equipment location every day to monitor it. Instead, all the information from the equipment goes back to our central hub, where we measure and monitor remotely. The labor is only needed upfront to get the equipment into our install base in the application, creating a solution that we can use to save on future labor costs for years to come.

Mike: We’re starting to see a lot more automation in the face of labor challenges. These challenges are something that all manufacturers are dealing with, and ABB is at the forefront of solutions with our own robotics division. We use a lot of our own robotics in our factories. I just visited our plant down in Puerto Rico, where we build a lot of circuit breakers for the U.S. market and use a lot of ABB robotics to do so. Labor shortages have impacted how much we rely on robotics at this site, as the robotic machines can run 24/7 without requiring breaks and are completely automated. The robots can pick up a breaker, put it in a testing machine, and repeat the process for thousands of circuit breakers. Using AI, these robots are able to figure out which breakers have passed quality tests, which ones have failed, and which need to be replaced. This is just one example of how we use automation across many of our factories.

Pat: The tasks that human beings have done in the past are solved by Festo’s electrical automation products, such as our electric actuators, grippers, and rotary actuators. They are especially helpful in the pick-and-place applications we use when we get ready to ship our products. That’s all partially or totally done by automated machinery now.

Javier: TE looks at increasing throughput across the whole production environment. We collaborate with our operators to bring the most advanced tooling solutions to applications including manufacturing plants. TE’s whole tooling portfolio helps us maintain our commitment to providing production floors maximum output, productivity, and reduced overhead with less overall manual labor.

Kevin: nVent HOFFMAN recently launched the E3 software platform with Zuken, one of our partners. In some of our smaller and medium-scale panel shops, there’s a significant experience gap between the head designers and entry-level team members trying to learn design. The E3 tool is basically AutoCAD on steroids. You can work in both 2D and 3D environments, and it allows you to build the schematics of the panels and their electronic components. For example, let’s say you have a head designer with plenty of experience who’s been in the organization for many years, and you have a newer graduate who’s still learning how to build out those schematics. With E3, you can build safety parameters and use drag-and-drop functionality to make it simpler for newer team members. This is just one emerging technology that we’re investing in and looking to partner with RS on to help some of our customers overcome these same types of labor challenges.

Chris: At Brady, we’re developing tools that take on the tedious labor involved with creating labels by hand. We utilize software, a mobile application, and systems that print and apply labels — taking the time-consuming labor out of customer processes. This allows end users to focus on more specialized tasks that are more particular to their job. For example, we just added a voice-to-text feature to our mobile app, Express Labels. It allows users to speak into the app that transcribes it using internal programming to help format wire identification labels that contractors can apply in the field. Let’s say, for example, a customer wants the number “2” printed on a label. The app will recognize the number spoken and print it as a number rather than a word. The app is also designed to pull files from the cloud that other people may have created or that reside in the cloud; so, a variety of different end users can use or even share the label files. Lastly, we have print and apply machines. These are printers that have files stored locally on them that print and apply labels in one motion rather than needing a secondary operation where someone must hand-apply labels, which is unnecessary added labor.