These examples of machine vision and the exciting possibilities they open for us are growing, and the future is now!

Vision data is heralded as the driving force of Industry 4.0, delivering between $1.2 and $3.7 trillion worldwide in value by 2025, according to McKinsey & Company, an advisor and consultant to many global businesses and institutions.

“I see how artificial intelligence (AI) and the fourth industrial revolution will impact every aspect of people’s lives,” says Fei-Fei Li, professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. Students are teaching robots to be better collaborators with people to motivate patients in recovering from a stroke, for example, and helping Google Health to screen eye images for diabetic retinopathy, a condition where early detection can prevent vision loss.

So, what is machine vision and what exactly can a computer see?

Simply put machine vision is the eye of the machine. It is visual input captured by a camera and converted to data. In manufacturing, machine vision is typically attached to a process system to monitor and improve efficiency, quality and operations on the plant floor.

While it isn’t entirely new, it is experiencing a renaissance as software is rapidly developing along with sophisticated robotic technology that makes full use of visual input. It was back in 1960s, when researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) first attempted to connect a camera to a computer in the hopes of realizing the full potential of computer intelligence and pattern recognition.

Safe to say, in 40-plus years since the early MIT endeavours, we have had major breakthroughs in the development of less expensive and much more robust hardware, as well as innovative and fast evolving software. This wave of new technology, pairing optical technology with advance algorithms, has gained momentum and is beginning to transform industry. Machine vision and the ability of artificial intelligence to see and do like humans has been the subject of rigorous research and growing interest.

It was in the 1980s and ’90s when machine vision went from the research lab to industry applications. Your favourite bottle of soda or beer was likely scanned for imperfections such as improper fill levels or crooked labels by a machine vision-enabled bottling line.

In the bottling line example, a simple machine vision system could include a light source and sensor at some point along the line to simply detect the presence of the product. A slightly more advanced system might use a camera to take an image of the bottle, and a digitizing device or frame grabber would turn that image into something that could be analyzed automatically. Computer software compares the image to the desired result, like a perfectly filled bottle with a straight label, as well as other prescribed criteria such as a neck label or cap straightness. When a defect is spotted, the product fails and is removed from the line.

That great old “I Love Lucy” episode, you know the one, where Lucy is being overwhelmed by chocolates coming off the conveyor belt, represents a situation that could have been completely avoided by a similar machine vision component that would have stopped or slowed the process when it recognized a back-up of product.

Today, advanced systems using machine vision typically involve high-resolution cameras or other imaging equipment paired with software algorithms capable of recognizing pre-established patterns. More and more frequently, these systems are powered by deep learning algorithms that use “neural networks” (so named as they are modeled on the human brain) to interpret them images. The networks are trained with large sets of sample images with known outcomes, which the algorithm attempts to identify and then learn from.

“I have always been convinced that the only way to get artificial intelligence to work is to do the computation in a way similar to the human brain,” says Geoffrey Hinton, Chief Scientific Advisor at the University of Toronto’s Vector Institute.

Innovation at the Institute has pioneered some very cool systems, like a robotic laboratory where thin-film materials for clean energy applications can be designed, tested and made commercially viable for manufacturing consumer electronics – a process that used to take more than 10 years is now possible in a fraction of the time.

Machine vision is helping manufacturers with everything from quality control, product identification, guidance and other inspection applications to problem assessment, product tracing, product safety, measurement and calibrating, inventory control and farming applications. Product tracing is especially important in industries like pharmaceuticals where it is important to track regulated ingredients, expiration dates and serial numbers.

Inventory control can also be monitored as barcodes and labels are digitally viewed to make certain the correct components are included as a product moves along an assembly line. Similarly, machine vision has tremendous possibilities in food processing where tracking supplies is essential to product safety. Farming, too, is seeing the introduction of harvesting units complemented with machine vision. In this setting, a robotic harvester can locate, identify and gently pick tender fruits without damage.

The oil and gas industry is relying on machine vision to help see and sniff out productivity and safety for offshore drilling platforms, like the four-legged robot Spot that takes on the tasks of data capture, inspection and reporting any anomalies along the sea floor. These insights provide real-time feedback and allow onshore mission control to work virtually with the offshore staff to quickly correct potentially critical problems.

Reliable machine vision has enabled more integrated robotics – systems working closely with human workers on the production floor in many manufacturing applications – allowing robots to take on more roles above and beyond the mundane and repetitive tasks that defined their place in the past.

As this technology continues to evolve, we must ask some pretty serious questions: is the identification and development of patterns or algorithms sufficiently accurate to allow the system to make real-world decisions? Vision and pattern algorithms based on neural networks can be very effective – often faster and more accurate than human eyes and brains, but they’re not infallible. When safety is a factor, or when a decision can affect human lives in some way, do we rely more on the machine, or on the human operator? I suppose it depends on the application.

Privacy has also been a concern with machine vision systems. The amount of data gathered and stored is staggering, and one must at least consider those implications. How should we feel about the camera on our phones guessing at our emotional responses to content presented to us? Our human biases might allow us to applaud a machine vision system for correctly identifying someone having a heart attack in their chair at home alone, saving a life with an alert to emergency response. But then at the same time we might be horrified at the machine watching us sleep.

Cautionary, speculative fiction has so many examples of potential misuse of these technologies, especially when paired with AI and corporate greed. But in reality, what’s next for machine vision?

“I am telling you, the world’s first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI and all its derivatives, and applies it in ways we never thought of,” say Mark Cuban, billionaire founder of Mark Cuban Companies who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and has stakes in Magnolia Pictures.

And it’s happening now.

At the start of the new millennium, healthcare began experimenting with machine vision. Early digital microscopes costing in excess of $300,000 were deployed but took over 24 hours to scan a single slide. Only the biggest labs with dedicated technicians could make use of this equipment.

Now two decades later, compact blood analysis equipment is becoming more ubiquitous and affordable for fast, accurate and more accessible diagnostics. Radiology is another application where machine vision, trained to identify patterns is allowing for faster review and quicker detection of diseases or other health anomalies.

No question, AI and machine vision will continue to be a growing part of our lives and workplaces. We’re going to see more complex relationships between machines and humans working side by side in increasingly more scenarios – especially where two sets of eyes, especially two sets with very different processing powers, are better than one.

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It’s clear that many, both insiders and onlookers, seem to fear that the ongoing implementation of robotics and machines into factories, assembly lines, and other manufacturing sites will mean the end of human-based labour and a sure sign of economic downfall. What is closer to the truth is that humans will likely continue to have a presence in all these automation-friendly sectors going forward – but it will more likely be in a partnership with machines rather than a tool-user relationship.

This emerging idea of human-robot collaboration is one that seems to promote a more positive and lasting link between an age-old workforce and its new-age solutions, as well as favourable economic and industrial returns.

The process of automation is hardly a new phenomenon, as some of the earliest examples of its role in the workplace date back to the 1960s with simple machines providing support for tasks like picking or spot welding.

Robotics gradually grew more advanced as the decades continued and adapted to support and enhance human roles in manufacturing settings, a trend that will certainly continue as more highly developed automation is developed and the buy-in for robotics becomes more accessible.

In a piece for the World Economic Forum, CEO and co-founder of Veo Robotics Patrick Sobalvarro describes a collaborative environment for humans and robots that is rapidly being adapted to as calls for changes in the market (i.e. faster production, higher quality standards) are coming about too quickly for humans alone to be able to respond to. On the other hand, modern robots and robotic tools operate too quickly and with workloads too dangerous to be effectively implemented near humans, while also lacking the intricacies and frameworks of the human mind that make modern-day innovation and education possible.

To truly succeed, according to Sobalvarro, workplaces of the future must “combine the strength, precision, and speed of industrial robots with the ingenuity, judgment, and dexterity of human workers.” A workplace that implements this kind of cooperation can see its processes speed up and take on greater efficiency, as well as benefitting from lowered costs and greater production diversification.

Current-day robotics operate in a framework that is referred to as Industry 4.0 (or the Fourth Industrial Revolution), essentially meaning that the technology is frequently interlaced and in concert with other “smart” technologies that aim to benefit humans and increase productivity. This new reality is leading to the possibility of a new hub for human-robot collaboration: “smart factories,” a development further expanded on in a paper, Trends in Smart Manufacturing: Role of Humans and Industrial Robots in Smart Factories, by Linn. D Evjemo, Tone Gjerstad, Esten I. Grøtli and Gabor Sziebig.

The researchers found that these factories will be able to operate with both high levels of technical efficiency and human-like elasticity and ingenuity, ideally combining these traits into a synergy of minimized costs and overall labour requirements.

“By connecting the robot even closer to the human, in terms of direct collaboration or task sharing within the same working area, there is important potential for a strong synergy between the robots’ and the humans’ capability; thus, a very productive, user-friendly, however, rapidly changeable, system,” say the authors.

This idea is not even a pipe dream at this point but a slowly dawning reality. Jonathan Wilkins, in writing for Reliable Plant, reports that human-robot collaboration is closer than ever thanks to the development and implementation of collaborative robots, or “cobots.” Cobots are made for just this type of workplace partnership, designed specifically to manage physical strain and endure repetitive tasks and so allow human partners to complete work better suited to the more complex and intuitive human brain.

These robots are also designed with surfaces that are less angular and are softer to the touch to reduce potential injuries to humans, along with sensors to detect nearby objects and avoid collision. Furthermore, regulations such as ISO 10219-2:2011 are currently at work to manage the introduction of these robots into human-centric environments to promote safety. Cobots are a budding aspect of the robotics industry as many businesses shape up to meet this new demand. Developments in the field could lead to greater sophistication down the road.

This is not to suggest that changes to industries which invite automation will leave humans unaffected. Although one goal of human-robot collaboration is to promote humans to less physically arduous and more creatively fulfilling roles, the fact is that automation is seen by some employers as an acceptable way to deemphasize human involvement altogether in manufacturing settings.

In an article for Time Magazine, Alana Semuels reports that “job loss via automation threatens [people of color] disproportionately as the labour being replaced by robotics largely affects Black and Latinx workers,” with automation potentially displacing 132,000 Black workers in the U.S. by 2030. Semuels also references studies that indicate job loss in the hundreds of thousands in factories in the last few decades and that robots could replace millions more workers in manufacturing spaces in the next several years.

A paper on the effect of robotics on labour markets by MIT professor Daron Acemoglu and Boston University professor Pascual Restrepo has found that for every machine per 1000 workers in the United States, wages have decreased by 0.42 percent. Around 400,000 jobs have been lost due to displacement.

Nevertheless, referring to the paper by Evjemo, Gjerstad, Grøtli, and Sziebig, the ideal that is human-robot collaboration is not yet ready for widespread adoption, especially when the sensor technology needed to ensure worker safety is still not at a level to effectively and predictably account for the less-than-clockwork behaviour of humans.

As with any new idea or movement, there are still more than a few kinks to work out, which many automation manufacturers and robotics experts are not blind to; however, the more technophobic cries of workers fearing being wholly replaced by machines may not be as merited as once thought.

Writing for Forbes, Ron Harbour and Steve Scemama note that robotics are still very much dependent on human input, especially when required to customize products (a task that still escapes today’s modern systems) or to maintain the machines at peak efficiency. The two de-emphasize the idea that robots will usurp humans in manufacturing altogether, adding that if this were even to be done at all, much would be lost in human knowledge that would not justify the still-considerable expense of automation.

In his paper with Restrepo, MIT professor Daron Acemoglu elaborates the current tension: “Overall, robots have a mixed effect: replacing jobs that relatively high-wage manufacturing employees used to perform, while also making firms more efficient and more productive.”

So, in summary, collaboration in the workspace between humans and robots presents many fascinating questions and exciting possibilities for genuine evolution in today’s manufacturing facilities.

As the tools, and as we as people, become more sophisticated in the effort to ease the toll taken on human bodies for the sake of growth and industry, it’s only with a guiding hand, and an imaginative spark from humans, that these more elegant robotic solutions can achieve anything beyond rudimentary goals in the workplace. And it’s clear that the positions of both workforces are best suited side-by-side in the facility of tomorrow.

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After purchasing a small building in Delphos, Ohio, the company began its initial year with only six employees and in the middle of the infamous 2008 recession, which devastated the economy and the automotive industry, a frequent customer for automated solutions. Thankfully, by December 2008, the company had grown to over thirty employees and has been evolving and expanding ever since.

The nascent company’s first big opportunity came in its initial year from CHEP, a global company concerned with moving goods and the largest wooden pallet company in the world. Wenninger explains how wooden pallets, as a business, are essentially recession-proof. “Everyone needs goods and [those goods] are shipped on pallets, which became a major part of our business.”

Wenninger remembers how, upon first entering the CHEP facility, he felt as though he was walking into the Stone Age. By 2008, CHEP used mostly basic manual equipment, with the plant producing 130,000 to 160,000 pallets a week with low automation.

Alliance began work on automating CHEP’s processes and continued to grow alongside it while pushing toward better and more efficient solutions for the pallet industry overall, now a large part of Alliance’s business.

In 2014, Wenninger and the Alliance team put time into producing a study on automation trends in Europe, discovering that the continent has been fifteen and twenty years ahead of the United States since the end of World War II when a shortage in available labor necessitated developing automation solutions. Using this information, as well as self-driven reports from the lumber industry, Alliance sought to improve the processes involved in wooden pallets, especially the dangerous and tedious process of pallet recycling. A 2012 OSHA study determined that the number one cause of industrial amputations came from manual pallet dismantlers.

The initial goal of automation for the pallet industry, as Wenninger recalls, was to offer safer and greener solutions while keeping employees, imbuing them with advanced skillsets to oversee automation instead of being pushed out by it. This objective led to the development of robotics systems for pallet businesses, the first installed in 2017 and now numbering about thirty within the market.

Along with these automated systems, Alliance introduced what Wenninger refers to as the urban sawmill line, the process of arranging lumber on a conveyor, running it through a vision system to determine length, width, and thickness, then sorting through size. This process has nearly doubled pallet production while using fewer people, helping to solve the ongoing labor problem and bring more automation opportunities into the market.

Beyond its work with pallets, Alliance continues to work across many business sectors as its work in the former provides proof of the company’s capabilities. Offering custom automation solutions and engineered systems, the company brings its in-house engineering skills to bear in the areas of Battery Assembly, Palletizing, and Assembly. “If you have an automation problem, we can solve it,” says Wenninger.

It is not just a dependable work ethic and favorable solutions that have kept the business a go-to name in automation. Alliance makes a point to be as open and transparent as possible with its customers to assess operations while finding the biggest automation needs through an in-person auditing process.

Wenninger stresses that Alliance is always looking for a mutually advantageous situation for it and its clients. “If we can’t solve a problem, we won’t sell [clients] on a solution… We all lose if we don’t all win.” Through this approach, customers gain knowledge of Alliance’s costs, profits, and margins, further allowing a greater understanding of their place as a valued partner. While customers are the experts at building a product, Alliance is an expert at manufacturing solutions to build it effectively and quickly. As Wenninger summarizes, Alliance does not want customers; it wants partners.

The past year and a half has been one fraught with change and challenge, but Alliance has come through to even greater success. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the company learned slowly what its new parameters and limitations would be to keep workers and customers safe. It was considered an essential business due to its work in consumer and food industries as well as shipping and transport.

Wenninger and company officials encouraged work-from-home for all who could safely do so, and although a few COVID cases were reported among employees, the company experienced no detriments other than some delays. In fact, not only was the company able to keep its doors open but it experienced its highest revenue and profit year in 2020.

While the company has been successful in the face of global challenges, a lasting effect of the pandemic observed by Wenninger is that every business is having trouble finding people to work. This has left a massive opportunity for automation across all sectors and is leading to a boom within the industry. However, these labor shortage problems have, in turn, affected Alliance and other automation companies, and it has become hard to find skilled engineers and trade workers to hire.

Alliance counters this by supporting various aspects of science, technology, education, mathematics (STEM) education, through coaching and funding local robotics clubs, establishing a scholarship fund for engineering students, and hiring high school interns to educate and excite them about the industry.

Major supply chain issues have also occurred, causing automation businesses to double the expected time on some projects due to ongoing problems in securing materials. The industry in 2021 has seen as many opportunities as obstacles but as countless business sectors have now moved into what has been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, centered on robotics and automation, the sky seems to be the limit for growth.

Alliance Automation is still young after only thirteen years in operation, so Wenninger expects it to continue growing at a rapid pace. Its first corporate building was 40,000 square feet, which it quickly outgrew. Now, the company is bursting at the seams even with more than double that amount of space. Wenninger began pursuing plans to design and build its own facility in 2019, looking for something to portray Alliance as a technical and forward-thinking company with an emphasis on work being fun.

After successful meetings with designers, the building should be completed in late Q1 2022. The new facility will contain a classroom to aid in Alliance’s recruitment efforts and will offer accredited classes for high school and college students that will count towards class credit and hopefully attract young workers to the automation industry.

Wenninger also hints that a lot of investment has been made internally into the research and development of new and exciting products to be released next year. The company has adopted a ‘forest-to-factory’ approach to its continued work in the pallet sector, as it seeks to marry it with robotics. “All the equipment built for the pallet industry is built for recycling, repair, sorting, teardown, and wood recovery of used pallets,” Wenninger explains. “We will be pushing projects that march closer to the forest… Whether forest or factory, Alliance will be there.”

The post Offering Safer, More Efficient Processes to Industries in Need<p class="company">Alliance Automation </p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Headquartered in Rochester, New York, this material handling and robotic automation systems integrator provides a wide array of services including system design, build, installation and after installation support. Formerly operating under the name Aloi Materials Handling, Adaptec Solutions emerged following a number of changes and acquisitions, rebranding itself successfully as a single source integrator for material handling and automation needs with a portfolio rich in both products and services.

“Adaptec’s predecessor Aloi Materials Handling dates back more than 40 years, and specialized in traditional material handling like warehousing and pallet racking,” says Bob Manion, partner and Executive Vice President, Business Development.

Founded in 1977 by John Aloi, Aloi Materials Handling was sold in 1987 to John Skivington, and bought by Jeff Gambrill and Manion in 2008. Prior to the Aloi acquisition, Manion purchased Lambert Material Handling — formerly known as Lamson Corporation — in 2007.

“We rapidly started building capabilities in automation robotics, growing robotics to 25 percent of our business within five years,” says Manion.

In 2014, Manion and Gambrill sold the Lambert portion of the business to Illinois-based company, ARPAC, LLC., and in 2016 the two partnered with Wincove Private Holdings. Under the leadership of new president and CEO, Andrew Creathorn, Aloi completed its first acquisition in 2019, combining operations with Automated Cells & Equipment, before acquiring Mainstream Inc. later that same year. In late 2020, Adaptec also purchased Integrated Solutions in Memphis.

Combining significant organic growth with three acquisitions and four brands, the leadership team made the decision to rebrand the combined companies as Adaptec Solutions. In August of 2020, Adaptec Solutions was launched, with the mandate of providing customers with wider-ranging products and services, enriched expertise, and integrated solutions capabilities across a broad range of markets and applications. The company can develop and manufacture unique solutions to meet its customers’ diverse needs.

“We’ve experienced 25 years of organic growth, adding sales engineers, new product lines and applications, and equipment such as cranes and lift tables,” says Gambrill. “Throughout the years and numerous changes, we’ve remained dedicated to maintaining quality customer service through a company culture that makes Adaptec a great place to work.”

Adaptec now has two locations in New York, one in Lexington, North Carolina, and one in Memphis, Tennessee. Each of the four locations house one of the company’s “centers of excellence” including robotics, material handling, complex conveyor solutions and customer service and support. Adaptec’s capabilities provide its customers a complete integrated solution from design/build through installation and startup including maintaining and upgrading the equipment after customers take possession of the solution. The company also provides integrated solutions with connectivity and the analytics to monitor and diagnose the equipment’s performance throughout its life cycle to help improve efficiency and profitability.

“We’ve enjoyed substantial growth in our core businesses as a result of both organic growth and strategic acquisitions in the past five years,” says Manion. “We’re in a unique position in materials handling and automation applications in targeted markets with end-to-end capabilities, from design to installation and service.”

Adaptec supports a diverse range of industries including grocery, food and beverage, industrial, automotive, aerospace, medical, and logistics, and integrates substantial engineering experience with superior levels of service to help customers elevate their capabilities and improve throughput, resulting in reduced labor costs and a safer working environment.

“One of our biggest challenges,” and certainly one that is no stranger to any company out there at the moment, “is finding good people committed to the company culture,” says Manion. “It’s a really competitive market for hiring skilled labor.”

To address this need, Adaptec prioritizes caring for its employees and making the workplace attractive for a younger demographic. In fact, Adaptec has partnered with local universities to develop an engineering partnership with relevant curriculum and a feeder program to help nurture new talent.

With impressive services that include robotic programming and training, design consulting, controls, repair and inspection services – always with customer satisfaction top of mind – the Adaptec team sports impressive credentials, including FANUC integrator certification and highly trained technicians with the ability to dispatch 24/7/365 to handle breakdowns, provide support, and offer remote troubleshooting and diagnostics including robotics and PLC troubleshooting. At the same time, team members uphold the company values of accountability, adaptability, drive, teamwork and, above all, customer service.

The company now has close to 300 employees and 70 service technicians available for aftermarket services that cover the continental U.S., along with projects in Puerto Rico, Canada and Mexico. “We go where our customers need us,” says Gambrill.

Adaptec’s acquisition of Integrated Solutions — a top supplier of custom engineered material handling equipment with significant experience in complex conveyor solutions — further bolstered the company’s growth strategy of providing more knowledge of applications and capability in key growth end markets, coupled with a facility located in a geographically attractive area, according to Gambrill. The Integrated Solutions acquisition provides customers with more products and services, and helps Adaptec further its goal of becoming a full-service company.

Indeed, the company’s rebrand has resulted in a number of progressive changes, including a new website domain (adaptecsolutions.com) and new online store (shop.adaptecsolutions.com), along with new mission and vision statements: “To deliver superior, efficient, safe solutions that enable our customers to always meet their commitments,” demonstrating the company’s desire to lead both in safety and efficiency, while also creating an excellent workplace atmosphere at each of its locations.

The acquisitions, while exciting, brought their own set of challenges and some understandable struggles when rebranding as Adaptec 18 months ago, says Manion, which were overcome as a team.

“We successfully merged four cultures from acquired companies into one united team,” he says of the company’s core business growth, which now places it in an excellent position in its served markets. “We have a pretty unique position in our served markets in that we provide a complete integrated solution from concept design to after installation support 100 percent supported by our own team; we don’t sub our work to others to support our projects.”

This also marks a key step in Adaptec’s ultimate goal of continuing to provide its customers with all the solutions they need throughout the full life cycle of their equipment. The company can now reduce life cycle costs, performing as a single entity providing 100 percent internal capabilities to turnkey material handling and automation projects from concept design through to engineering, assembly, testing, installation and field service support.

“Our growth is a result of our focus on being a full-service integration company and we’re now ideally placed to support the ongoing automation demands in the industrial manufacturing and distribution/warehousing industries,” says Manion. “Our team has the right products, design solutions and expertise to help you achieve manufacturing goals, including optimal productivity.”

Providing superior service and support for virtually any automation, robotic or material handling system also means working with reliable suppliers every step of the way. “Adaptec has suppliers from across the U.S., and some suppliers that are global players in the industry,” says Gambrill. “Almost all are longstanding carryovers from companies we’ve acquired, and we’re proud to have maintained and grown these relationships.”

Other recent challenges have included, of course, dealing with the pandemic. Adaptec was understandably concerned when COVID first hit and wondered — as did most businesses — about the benefits of remote working conditions versus in-office. “We’ve found that some employees have been working harder when working remotely,” says Gambrill.

And that hard work is definitely paying off with three growth verticals. “Our order growth in the last four months has been phenomenal,” says Manion. “The size of our projects in the past two years has grown and we’re now taking on an eight-figure order. The company has also experienced growth in volume, size and the complexity of our projects.”

Revenue has also been extremely positive, with 30 percent growth since the company restructured. “It’s consistent with the industry average for sales per employee,” says Manion.

Goals moving forward for Adaptec are numerous, including continued growth in its core business areas. “We want to expand capabilities and our breadth and depth of products and services,” says Gambrill, which includes going downstream in the supply chain.

The company has received several awards of note as well, including being named the second-fastest growing company in Rochester, an award from FANUC as a top 10 integrator in the U.S. and being named a finalist for two awards from the American Marketing Association of Rochester, for branding and COVID response.

But the company’s biggest achievement might be its ongoing dedication to creating a culture that will outlive any award.

“Adaptec really wants to make sure the company’s a great place to work for younger people through both recruiting and building company culture,” says Manion. “We really care about our employees and customers. It’s the focal point of our culture and values.”

The post Customer-Centric – Creating a Caring Culture<p class="company">Adaptec Solutions</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Founded in 2010 in Flint, Michigan, the 4D Systems team operates largely in North and South America, where it provides new abilities and resources for its customers through a variety of services such as robot programming, simulation, controls, and design.

This certified robotic integrator specializes in the creation of custom robotic work cells using multiple layouts and solutions for numerous applications including spot welding, material handling, vision, blasting, painting, cutting, sealing, and thermal processing.

Designing and building turn-key robotic systems out of its impressive 10,000-square-foot shop, the team installs and supports these for customers across the continent.

Using years of robotic experience developed through R&D, the company sets its 70-plus highly-skilled engineers to work with manufacturers everywhere, designing work cells for production needs. Though the team is more than capable of handling multi-million-dollar projects – and can work with any existing robotic system – an important element for 4D Systems is attention to those companies with smaller requests.

Small is specialized
“We don’t compete with the big companies. We do smaller, specialty work,” says President and Owner, JP Rasaiah. “We have great customer service, and we believe in helping companies who don’t know where to start. Where we really excel is complex tasks and helping with little projects that companies may think are too expensive, but actually may not be.”

A certified integrator for FANUC, ABB, Yaskawa and Kawasaki, and specializing in the creation of custom robotic work cells, 4D Systems provides automation solutions for the automotive, oil and gas, aerospace, consumer, defense and medical industries, to name a few, employing innovative and competitive solutions to help increase market profitability and productivity via its world-class process, workflow, and asset management.

“A company comes to us and says, ‘We need help, we need a robot,’ and 4D Systems works from A to Z,” says Rasaiah. “We help right from the preplanning stages, at the very end or in between. Automation doesn’t have to be expensive. It can be scaled to meet most budgets.”

It is those smaller needs and requests that 4D Systems has made its area of expertise, the projects that larger companies may find not worth their time or effort.

Suite of services
4D Systems boasts an impressive suite of robotics and automation services including turnkey specialty systems, building and installing automated robotic systems, robotic and human simulation software, PLM (product lifecycle management) software, robot programming, controls programming, simulation services, mechanical design services, and laser scanning pre and post integration. Such a full bouquet of services allows the team to provide outstanding quality and options to clients.

Rasaiah is particularly proud of the company’s exhaustive familiarity with its software, enhancing its ability to help companies at every step, from start to finish.

“It’s the same software we use in our products, which we use and know well,” he says. “Being familiar with it gives us an edge. We sell and support the software. We know all the software, so we know it works and can assist customers when needed.”

As leaders in all aspects of the PLM cycle, including CAD concept, data management, manufacturing planning, manufacturing improvements, simulation, work instructions, and project management and disposal, Rasaiah says that 4D Systems “does a lot of things,” all while working and interacting as a team and handling any challenges that may arise.

“We’re a team that works well together and overcomes obstacles which is really important,” says Rasaiah. “We constantly learn from the mistakes of other organizations, which helps make us better. We listen to others and learn, because we want to grow and improve our quality for customers.”

Full simulations
While continuing to grow its specialty robotics field, 4D Systems is still committed to performing full simulations.

“A lot of companies only do partial simulations, not full,” he says. “We simulate properly and make sure every aspect is working right. We laser scan a lot of things beforehand and put everything together to make sure it all fits perfectly.”

This commitment to customer service is what makes 4D Systems stand out from its competition, along with the ability of the talented engineering team to create turn-key solutions.

“Most of our engineers are trained in multiple disciplines,” says Rasaiah. “Mechanical, robot programming, controls and simulation. This gives them the ability to understand other phases of turn-key that they may not be responsible for but have to work with.”

Using the best software to design, verify and execute its robotic systems means 4D Systems can pass along the absolute best results to customers.

“We incorporate laser scanning pre and post,” says Rasaiah. “That way we design something that works the first time. Other companies design systems only to find out the system doesn’t fit, or the robot cannot reach properly. Our integrated approach keeps this from happening, preventing time and cost overruns which can be very costly as related to time to market.”

Expanding interests
4D Systems has also diversified into other fields of interest, including aerospace and defense, and work with the U.S. Government.

“Robotics have been widely adopted by automotive for decades, but it’s not as easy to be adopted by aerospace and defense due to regulations,” explains Rasaiah. “Currently the aerospace and defense sectors are using more and more robots. We’ve been involved with projects involving robotics at Hill AFB, Tinker AFB and we’ve sold software to Holloman AFB.”

With the ability to supply companies with the additional manpower required to achieve their various objectives, the company’s robot programmers and controls engineers not only help customers meet production and automation goals, but also help with employee support and training.

“We understand the software. We know software. We sell it and we cross-train a lot,” says Rasaiah. “All our people are cross-trained which is important. Our people have multiple disciplines.

The company’s dedication to lean manufacturing processes also shows its commitment to eco-awareness and reducing waste in its processes. Cutting potential environmental waste is a vital aspect of robotics that many may not understand.

As an example, Rasaiah describes how robots were used – instead of the variable skills of humans – to properly and precisely install automotive sun-roofs and avoid leaking, costly repairs, and unrecyclable waste, all of which have been issues in the past.

“Some things are too hard to reuse and repurpose for environmental issues, so robotics can make it better the first time around,” says Rasaiah. “And as for potential health issues, auto plants, for instance, can be physically dirty and unhealthy, so it’s good to have robots there doing those jobs instead of humans.”

Utilizing lean practices for companies is of utmost importance on a global stage where eliminating as much manufacturing waste as possible is the best way to fight environmental damage. Robotics and digital manufacturing are beneficial both ecologically and economically and will continue to grow in a variety of manufacturing sectors.

4D Systems is constantly innovative in its practices, with an eye to helping customers meet their goals right now, while also being aware of the importance of long-term business plans.

Spurred by challenge
As with most companies, dealing with the pandemic this past year-and-a-half has created many a challenge for 4D Systems to deal with.

“There are obstacles to overcome on every project,” says Rasaiah. “But delays due to market uncertainty because of COVID are the biggest. However, I think the industry has mostly gone past that obstacle by adopting protection guidelines.”

Rasaiah is quick to credit the 4D Systems team for its outstanding dedication to producing the best work possible while working with determination to overcome all challenges.

“Being part of a team that works well together and is able to overcome obstacles is a big point of pride,” he says. “We’re also always learning from the mistakes of other organizations and creating a better product.”

Moving forward, Rasaiah sees 4D Systems continuing to expand and grow while staying true to its mandate of helping smaller companies achieve their own goals.

“We would like to grow our specialty robotic systems to improve quality and fill current needs,” he says. “There are some companies that need robotics but aren’t sure how to go about implementing. We would like to help those companies.”

With a determined focus on client satisfaction while helping customers gain an edge in a competitive market, 4D Systems aids cost-effectiveness and productivity through providing and supporting world PLM solutions.

The role of robots
For those out there still wary of the role robots are playing in manufacturing and the workplace, Rasaiah stresses that while they may take some jobs, they create them, too. The robots that work in manufacturing settings to create better, more ecologically friendly components require skilled human labor to design, engineer, build, control and maintain them.

And companies that look to 4D Systems for guidance will find everything they need, from a price that fits to a finished product that meets their needs.

“We call it early design processing,” says Rasaiah. “We think this is how it should work. We help with a company’s budget to develop different scenarios while saving money along with eliminating waste.”

Talking about what else sets 4D Systems apart from similar companies, Rasaiah reiterates the company’s ongoing dedication to ensuring attention is given to those companies and customers that larger organizations may tend to overlook.

“We focus on specialty robotic systems,” he says. “There are much bigger integration companies that we do not compete with, the reason being they focus on large repetitive systems. Typically, the systems that require complex vision or other complex tasks are not taken on by these companies. We work with the difficult solutions.”

The post Robotic Systems: Smarter, Better, Faster – and Nicer<p class="company">4D Systems</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

“Workforce was the number one thing we heard from manufacturers across the country when we were doing round tables,” says Stewart Cramer, Chief Manufacturing Officer. “There’s a lot of concern about an aging workforce and about kids going into manufacturing as a career, so we’re approaching it on a number of different levels.”

NGen’s first approach involves attracting more young people into manufacturing through an initiative called Careers of the Future (www.careersofthefuture.ca). This program offers outreach to young people in elementary and secondary schools to better understand what manufacturing looks like as a career, and to help shift the perception of manufacturing.

“One of the things we really want people to understand is that manufacturing is STEM,” says Cramer. “It’s modern, clean and safe, and it’s very sophisticated. We’ve had an amazing response so far.”

The website has garnered hundreds of thousands of views — including from young women. “It’s exciting that we may have gotten some messaging out there that will really make a difference in the mid- to long-term for our workforce,” says Cramer.

The campaign started with public opinion research that NGen issued with one of its campaign partners targeting teens, their parents, and educators such as guidance counsellors and teachers, to gain perspective on their views of the manufacturing space and whether or not they saw opportunities in terms of careers for young people there.

“Really everything we did as part of this campaign was to move the needle on what we heard in the discovery phase,” says Robbie MacLeod, Director, Strategic Communications & Corporate Secretary. “We did see some great success. There was also a bursary component, comprising 10, $10,000 bursaries. We were looking to students themselves to say what they would do in a career in advanced manufacturing, and what sorts of challenges they would solve as part of that.”

There is also a multi-media push, with NGen looking at partnerships with Twitch, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, along with some TV spots, which resulted in a total exposure of about 330 million. It’s that kind of exposure that’s vital to helping potential future employees find their way to a field that might be overlooked or viewed as undesirable, possibly due to a lack of education.

“It’s not only kids, but also their primary influence network when they’re at the phase in their educational path when they’ll be making the important decisions in terms of what they’ll study in university and what they want to do for a career,” says MacLeod. “We’ve really noticed there’s a huge importance to getting an ear and resources for parents and educators who are going to be influencing those decisions.”

NGen is also focused on promoting upskilling. Companies don’t always know where to begin when looking at digital transformation and Industry 4.0, explains Cramer. In response, NGen has launched an initiative called Amp Up: Accelerated Manufacturing Upskilling Program, featuring company discounts as well a catalogue of courses in both English and French from approximately 23 training organizations, colleges, universities and industry-based trainers across Canada.

“We’ve got courses across the spectrum that we think are really helpful to businesses,” says Cramer. These courses include Advanced Manufacturing Technologies, Industry 4.0, Data Science, Leadership and Supervisory Skills, Supply Chain Management, Circular Economy, and Project Management, to name a few.

The initiative has been well received, with a brisk uptake on the program, Cramer says, adding there’s still some funding available for this fiscal year.

“We’re also quite focused on helping SMEs in particular – but not only SMEs – in their digital journey. Statistically, more than 80 percent of companies that take on a digital transformation don’t accomplish their objectives,” says Cramer. “There are a lot of reasons for that, but one that’s really important is that, while the technology in and of itself works, the technology in and of itself isn’t enough, so we’ve developed the Transformation Leadership Program, or TLP.”

The TLP is a series of exercises supported by instruction that helps manufacturers assess their entire organizational structure, strategies, ability to execute project management capabilities, market position, relationships with customers, and role in supply chains both as a customer and a supplier in a number of different areas.

“We’re really trying to help organizations know what they don’t know and give them a broad overview of all the things that need to go into their strategy,” says Cramer. “With exercises done by individual members of an organization’s leadership team, you get the opportunity to make sure that everyone understands the mission the same way, that the words mean the same thing to everyone in the organization and the organization is aligned… Going forward, we’re focused on how we can use Industry 4.0 to build superior manufacturing value change in Canada. We think the TLP is a mechanism to do that.”

Through this methodology, NGen encourages companies to pick a few of the top priorities that come out of the various exercises and aim for a balanced approach of transformation.

“The response to the initial deployments has been fantastic,” says Cramer. “We actually took a company through it with its suppliers and the response was very positive. Feedback was that no one had ever been through anything quite like this before, so we’re now in the process of rolling out a core TLP program.”

While the initial deployment was eight weeks, NGen is now rolling out a three-week, 15-hour program to try with some partners later this year; the goal is to then take hundreds of Canadian companies through this process. NGen believes that by going through an alignment and strategy exercise, it can improve the success rate of digital transformations and move more companies into a successful implementation of Industry 4.0.

Collaboration Days are another of NGen’s key initiatives, and even though the last one was virtual, it had 379 companies in attendance, demonstrating how strong the drive to innovate is in Canadian manufacturing.

Along with workforce initiatives, NGen is also continuing to focus on supply chain resilience and sustainability. In June, NGen brought together thought leaders around the Canadian manufacturing economy for its first manufacturing supply chain summit, which involved breakout panels in the areas of aerospace and defense, automotive, food manufacturing, heavy industrial, and equipment manufacturing.

“They were all separate and simultaneous, so none of them heard one another,” says Cramer. “Each panel covered two questions: What did COVID teach us, and what should a manufacturing supply chain look like in the future?”

Feedback showed some of the participants had never heard from anyone from a particular industry, even though in many cases they use the same supply chain. “They all came back with a lot of the same challenges in terms of more tightly integrated, transparent supply chains, better visibility through the supply chain, and the opportunity for Industry 4.0 to unleash supply chains and make for a stronger value network across Canada,” says Cramer.

Looking forward, NGen is particularly excited about the newly launched challenge of Zero Emission Manufacturing to help Canadian companies enter the electric vehicle (EV) market. The goal of this challenge is to create not only new value chains, but to unlock them through the application of advanced manufacturing technologies.

“We’re hoping to build highly efficient, automated and sustainable manufacturing facilities that ultimately are Net Zero all in,” says Cramer. “It’s an incredibly high-growth market, and we’re proud of the ability of this organization to put together meaningful challenges, to pivot rapidly, to be opportunistic, and to help Canadian manufacturers pursue markets.”

NGen’s initial cohort of 209 projects will all reach completion in the next 15 months, and future projects will be screened for a strong business component, technology, and successful advanced manufacturing business results.

“We’re very excited about the impact we think we’re going to have on Canadian manufacturing,” says Cramer. “When we look ahead, what we’re most excited about is how much impact our projects are really delivering, how many jobs and patents we’ve created, how many partnerships we’ve established.”

Ultimately, NGen’s aim is to take whole supply chains through programs together to better align them with the goal of building the most robust supply chains in the world within Canada, says Cramer, adding that in addition to driving project delivery, Superclusters have an ecosystem focus NGen builds into its project pipeline in terms of forcing collaboration and driving companies to work and come together through true collaborations.

“The way we’ve approached project design is very much focused around building a stronger and more sustainable Canadian manufacturing ecosystem,” he says. “Our workforce initiatives include getting kids into manufacturing and upskilling existing workers, and we’re now working with partners on work-integrated learning solutions.”

NGen plans to continue addressing all of the issues and challenges the manufacturing industry faces, not only today but for future workforces as well.

“We’ve built relationships all over Canada, we’ve introduced companies to one another, we’ve introduced clusters to one another, we’ve helped colleges create micro credentials in specific areas that we know are of interest to our members, and we have over 4,000 members now across Canada,” says Cramer. “We’re really focused on driving positive results for manufacturers across Canada and the entire ecosystem that supports them. That’s a bit unique in terms of our mission. It’s something we’re quite excited about and that the organization takes a lot of pride in.”

The post Building a Better Workforce Together<p class="company">NGen</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

The coronavirus was characterized by the WHO as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Less than two weeks later, cases started appearing in North America. With lockdowns and stay-at-home orders issued, our lives turned upside down.

To cap it all, COVID showed us how vulnerable we are – how dependant we were on other countries for such simple, but crucial, things as personal protective equipment (PPE), such as medical masks, disposable gloves, face shields, and hand sanitizer.

Problem meets opportunity
When supply chains of medical products, many of them from China, slowed or broke entirely, various levels of government across Canada put out the call to manufacturers for help, and many listened. In Ontario’s Oro-Medonte Township, Molded Precision Components (MPC) – known mainly for its work in the automotive sector – acted quickly and decisively.

“It’s been an amazing challenge,” says MPC President and Owner David Yeaman. Looking to diversify into medical products – which require superior standards and perfect quality – prior to the pandemic, the company already had some of the tools and manufacturing capabilities in place when the need for medical PPE became dire.

With many capabilities, including advanced engineering, automation, design and development, contract manufacturing, automation and tool design and build, Molded Precision Components works with many large Tier 1 multinational customers.

Pulling out all the stops
When the pandemic worsened in March of last year, the company’s work in automotive plummeted. Scrutinizing the PPE list requirements from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Yeaman jumped at the chance to help.

Starting on a Monday, the company had a patent-pending design for a new face shield developed by Friday.

By the following Tuesday, MPC received a grant from Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (NGen) to execute the order: to manufacturer a new Canadian patent-pending, two-piece, medically approved, recyclable face shield. To carry-out the demanding order, MPC added 115 students to its existing roster of 55 workers.

Working tirelessly throughout the summer, MPC made 27 million face masks for front-line workers.

It was the ultimate Canadian success story: people coming together during a crisis. Over six months, MPC built-out every machine in its facility, and purchased 16 brand-new moulding machines.

Temporarily moving its warehouse into a local hockey arena, the company transformed the space into a mass manufacturing PPE factory – over-doubling its capacity with all the new equipment – along with installing some machines into other local moulding facilities as well. The company also took over an abandoned fire hall for its automation group.

“So we had the fire hall, a hockey arena, and directly across the road was a drive-in which we took over for parking, because we didn’t have parking for 185 people. On any one day, we’d have 80 to 100 vehicles parked in the drive-in,” says Yeaman of the move, which saw the company relocating from last March to September.

Running 24/7 continental shifts to make millions of masks quickly pushed Molded Precision Components in unexpected directions.

A new facility, none too soon
Originally founded as Molded Plastic Consultants in 1980, the business was first owned by a German toolmaker making small prototype tools. Realizing its great potential, the company was purchased by David Yeaman and Thomas Woegerer in 2006. Mechanical engineers with a background in automotive plastics injection moulding, the duo “kind of took it from scratch and build it into a lights-out Industry 4.0 manufacturing facility,” according to Yeaman.

Although the business was small at the time and operating with a handful of employees, it was a known commodity. And since Yeaman and Woegerer were manufacturers and not consultants, they changed the name from “Consultants” to “Components,” cleverly retaining “MPC” unchanged.

In 2016, the name change took effect, along with a new logo featuring a micrometer and a stylized cog wheel to represent precision.

This past September saw MPC celebrate the opening of its new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. Including office space, the new structure “will help expand our advanced manufacturing capabilities and secure critical supply chains here in Canada,” says Yeaman.

Prior to starting construction in January 2020, the company was at 28,000 square feet between two facilities. The addition of 45,000 square feet will see the company at approximately 73,000 square feet total. “It’s a huge expansion,” says Yeaman. “We’ve multiplied it by three.”

The massive new facility will house a world first: a vertically integrated filling and automated packaging system for hand sanitizer, “capable of producing 80,000 litres a day – from pellet-to- pallet in-house,” according to the company.

Home to over 70 members of the MPC team, it will boast 15 new injection moulding machines with full automation capabilities, a new cube injection moulding (CIMS) machine, and 4,000 square feet of cleanroom manufacturing space, making it ideal for medical production.

In the months prior to COVID, most of MPC’s business was automotive, with the company receiving its first medical contract in November 2019. The initial plan for the new building was a mix of automotive technology and some medical, which triggered the company into needing a new building, “but my plan was that we would fill that new building up over 5 to 10 years,” says Yeaman. “That kind of happened in six months.”

Supply chain challenges
At the height of the pandemic, Canada faced a desperate shortage of PPE including face shields, medical masks, swabs, pipettes for testing, and hand sanitizer.

Starting down the path of making N95 masks, MPC was soon asked about making caps and bottles for sanitizer, with NGen putting out the challenge to help develop new advanced manufacturing systems to fight COVID and other future pandemics.

“When we saw the demand for caps and bottles for sanitizer, being a plastics company, we looked at that and said ‘what can we do to do something different from what’s out there currently with the global supply chain model?’” says Yeaman.

Typically, the process to make and fill plastic bottles with sanitizer is costly, and consumes an abundance of resources such as heat and fuel. Plastic preforms, which look like test tubes, are made in China. These are shipped by sea to ports in North America where they are placed on trains, then transported by truck to a blow moulder facility.

Once heated, they are blown into bottles, which are packaged and shipped to a company who fills the bottles with sanitizer, likely brought in from an outside company. The filled bottles are moved to skids, and shipped.

“When you analyse and trace that supply chain, that plastic travels 15,000 km,” says Yeaman. “It goes through four to five different companies. It goes through 5,000 square feet of warehouses and manufacturing facilities. It takes about three months to get here in normal times, and during the pandemic it didn’t come at all.”

Changing the game
Realizing that the current supply chain system has many downfalls – from Canada’s dependency on other countries to lengthy time frames, and energy waste to pollution – MPC looked at how to make a bottle in a one-step process, then vertically integrate that with fill lines and the sanitizer matching process.

Through its Cube system used for automotive manufacturing, the company examined how it could transform multiple steps into a one-step process.

The challenge: create a vertically-integrated combination injection-moulding device that injection-moulds preforms, blows them into bottles, sees the bottles directly into the fill line, fills the bottles with sanitizer made on-site, and caps, labels and packages them with no hands touching the product until completion.

Dubbed the pellet to pallet system, this saw MPC put together a proposal from Ngen.

“This is actually the first-in-the-world system for manufacturing hand sanitizer that takes a pallet of plastic to a finished product in 18 minutes,” says Yeaman. “So if you compare the global supply chain model of 15,000 km that pallet travels before it hits a skid ready to be bought, ours goes 100 feet. Instead of four to five companies, it goes through one. And instead of 500,000 square feet of companies and everything, it’s in 15,000 square feet and it saves 5,000 tons of CO2 a year for the environmental impact, to put it in perspective.”

And since all materials and ingredients, from packaging to sanitizer, come from Canadian sources, this technology reduces our dependence on other countries.

“At the end of the day, when things settle, you’re going to have to compete globally,” says Yeaman.

“So you are going to have to innovate either product and/or process to be globally competitive. You can’t just say, ‘well, we are here in Canada so pay me more.’ What are we doing differently that changes the game with your product and/or process that allows you to be globally competitive, that gives you a sustainable model going forward under normal times? Then you’ll have sales,” he says.

Globally competitive
“It’s not just tooling-up what everybody else is doing, it’s coming up with something different, and that’s what we’ve done with the sanitizer. We’ve taken a global supply chain and put it in the 15,000 square feet And we can now make up premium product that’s safe at a globally competitive margin.

“So now we’ll have a sustainable business doing that, and at the same time we’re securing our supply chain. So we are not asking our customers to pay more because we’re Canadian – yes, it’s a benefit to you – but at the same time we can compete with anybody around the world because we elevated the process.”

Working toward the future, Yeaman and his team at MPC continue recruiting the best and brightest from Ontario’s universities and colleges including Waterloo, Queens, the University of Toronto, and Georgian College.

“Supporting and building youth and helping them reach their full potential is a big core of what we are about in terms of our community involvement, and what we are trying to do here,” he says. “So there’s a lot of effort put into youth.” This includes apprenticeships and a scholarship program where every summer one or two students are awarded a scholarship to help with their school expenses.

Recent months have seen other initiatives, including a relationship with Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) to support the development of green technology in Canada. Continuing to work on implementing its sanitizer system, the company keeps growing in medical, automotive, food and beverage, and industrial sectors.

One of the company’s biggest initiatives remains the development of a vertically integrated, 83-acre medical innovation park called MediCA. This will see companies collaborate in order to secure supply chain in Canada on critical health security needs.

“The sanitizer line is the perfect example demonstration model of what can be done if we take a good look at the global supply chain model on these products and say ‘how can we bring those together so we can secure the supply chain and at the same time reduce costs, and have a positive impact on the environment?’” says Yeaman.

“That’s what the sanitizer model proves. We want to expand on that across the board of all medical supplies that are critical to our health.”

The post Just What Canada’s PPE Industry Needs – a Game-Changer<p class="company">Molded Precision Components</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

“COVID was a good opportunity, as unfortunate as it is, for us to try and introduce some modernization into the market,” says Jeff Killin, ICP Director of Defense Sales.

ICP made a decision to accelerate its automation and pivot into manufacturing personal protective equipment (PPE) to help Canada overcome shortages the country’s frontline healthcare workers endured because of the pandemic. It was a win-win for hospitals and the ICP team who witnessed major growth in manufacturing and revenues.

High-quality, durable materials and design are what ICP does best, with a wide range of products from packaging for valuable auto parts to hypothermia-protective floatation jackets for the Canadian Navy. Core to its business are strategic defense and aerospace products, such as specialty parachutes that return recoverable rocket components from space.

“We didn’t know how this was going to affect our business and we were worried about maintaining our current business,” Marc Langlois, President of ICP, says of early COVID days. “But, on the other hand, we just thought, ‘we’re hearing about PPE shortages.’ So, we reached out to everybody and said, ‘we want to help.’ Everything was moving fast during COVID and after a month we got our first order.”

Clearly, this decision to come to the aid of Canada’s PPE crisis was beneficial to ICP’s short-term and long-range growth and strategy. “We’ve doubled in size twice, two years in a row,” says Langlois. ICP is now making 200 to 250 thousand PPE gowns every month.

Best of all, the move into providing medical supplies didn’t impact the company’s existing defense product business. “It’s actually increased in demand,” says Langlois. He recalls how ICP was pulled in two directions with the skyrocketing demand in business to supply medical gowns and keep up with the contracts for defense and aerospace.

At the same time, managing operational growth hasn’t been trivial. “It was difficult to hire and bring new people in,” Langlois says. “Hiring during a pandemic is difficult because you never know if someone you bring in for an interview will start an outbreak and everything will be shut down for two weeks.”

Langlois and his partners realized that automation was going to be fundamental in the company’s expansion. “We’ve always had an automation mindset but our industry has historically been very manual and slow changing. I’d say we are at the forefront of innovation and R&D.”

ICP knew that making medical gowns the traditional way would work for the time being, but if the company wanted to stay in the game long-term, it had to automate. The market for top-performing PPE is here to stay.

So, what does automation look like versus more traditional ways of manufacturing?

Historically, you would have a high-skilled employee at a sewing machine guiding material through the machine. Automation has simplified this process. Material is selected and placed on the machine. Computers do the rest, guiding the machine through a preset stitching pattern. This process significantly reduces machine time and allows highly skilled operators to be deployed on other manufacturing functions.

Similarly, cutting has been automated. These automated cutting processes were also in place pre-pandemic, but with increased requirements to manufacture PPE, ICP invested in more advanced cutting equipment. These machines result in less human time, reduced waste and improved speed to market.

“This investment helps us today, but it will also help in three years when the rebidding begins for long-term contracts. If we have an automated solution that is already paid off and the bugs have been worked out, theoretically, we can offer a better price and get more business,” says Killin.

The automated processes not only result in better pricing and reduced environmental impact, they allow for better deployment of labour throughout the manufacturing process. “Although medical gowns are difficult to design in terms of quality, they are quite simple to manufacture,” he adds.

Ensuring the gowns perform consistently is also key – and critical for healthcare workers and their patients. ICP found that a lot of the gowns initially sourced during the pandemic were imported and not up to Canadian standards. And many of the PPE products manufactured in Canada were being done by companies that didn’t have experience making medical gowns or other high-performance products.

This gave ICP the advantage. The company knows all about high-performance products and the need for exacting standards to withstand harsh environments and deadly viruses. Killin himself was an infantry sergeant in the Canadian military and training specialist for operations at home and overseas. The ICP team translated its know-how in the manufacturing of body armour for soldiers into the manufacture of reusable PPE.

Other gowns on the market that were rated to last 100 washes were failing after just five or 10 washes. “Our design and engineering team and quality team came up with new designs that allowed anyone with a sewing machine to produce high-performance, reusable medical gowns,” says Killin.

So the next pivot for ICP is more advanced automation. Both the simple and complex products on the company’s production line require an operator, someone to sew the material. “If we’re able to take some of those less skilled positions and automate them, it allows us to move the labour force onto more technical products like parachutes for space vehicles or other more complex products without having an extended timeline in terms of delivery,” says Langlois.

Automation for making parachutes is another area of interest for ICP, but timing has been a challenge, even with a track record of making these products for 20 years. “Although our customer would get multi-year contracts from the government, they continued to order from us on a yearly basis.” This year-to-year ordering scenario doesn’t provide the team with enough security to plan longer-term for automation. Ideally, ICP wants to lock in yearly ordering pricing with the customer, automate, and then begin negotiating multi-year material pricing with suppliers to reduce production costs.

Automation allows for less manual labour going into a finished product and a more competitive price. And that’s good for business as manufacturers help fuel the country’s economic recovery as we slowly emerge from the pandemic.

“Ultimately, a competitive price for a well-made product is in the best interest of the customer and government,” says Killin, of Canada’s push for reshoring. “And it’s also an argument to keep manufacturing in North America.”

The post A Business Boom Inspires Investment in Automation<p class="company">International Custom Products (ICP)</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Founded in 1967 in Leominster, Massachusetts by Jean and Roger Rosbury, the company manufactures in both Leominster and Dorval (Montreal), Quebec, and proudly caters to a niche market in small or large quantities and custom colors. What started with only two employees in 1972 gradually and steadily grew, and in 2001 the company moved to the building it occupies today, with 26 employees and $7 million in sales.

In 2009 F&D Plastics purchased the company CEK in Montreal, opening up an operation there featuring specifically configured compounding equipment for high-performance custom colors for fiber applications. This was followed by another purchase in 2013, and after completing a merger of the two, today F&D manufactures about 65 percent of its product in Canada and about 35 percent in the United States. Total sales at both locations are $20 million.

Doing successful business in a merger and acquisition environment requires steadiness, reliable work, and standing out from the competition, all of which F&D Plastics excels at.

“We’ve been able to separate ourselves by focusing on color match turnaround time, which is a huge thing,” says Bob Rocheleau, CFO. “Usually if you can turn around a color match — which means match the color that the customer wants and have it approved – within 10 days then you’re doing really well. If it’s out much more than 10 days and your competitors are getting their color matches in, then you’ve essentially lost the opportunity for that match.”

F&D has even managed to reduce time to within five days, which has helped elevate its industry standing over the years, especially more recently, says Rocheleau.

“Maintaining that high quality of customer care is vital for the company,” he says. “All businesses are into customer service, of course, so it’s of the utmost importance, but we’ve taken it to another level. We really instill the value of customer service across the entire organization.”

Rocheleau gives credit where it’s due: to the workers who mix the color batches and put them through the extruder machine to create the color concentrate pellets; the lab employees; the sales team; the customer service department; and the Vice President of Production, all of whom help set this team apart.

“We’ve gotten our production down to where we’re meeting our promised delivery dates and often exceeding them by a few days, which is really quite incredible,” he says. “Hats off to our production team and our staff working the machines.”

Rocheleau also credits consistency in communication, which helps employees stay on the same page and work together effectively. “The team knows we’re seeing the benefits of that paying off in better customer service in our time delivery,” he says.

Another F&D accomplishment includes developing a new pricing strategy that greatly encouraged customers to choose the company over competitors.

“It’s been very beneficial,” Rocheleau says. “You think if you give your customer a better price you’re reducing your profits, but we found that by giving our customers a more competitive price we’re actually strengthening our relationship with them and getting more color matches. It’s worked out quite well.”

Does the company receive positive customer feedback for those kinds of changes? Definitely.

“We’ve been fortunate because they do give us the feedback, especially the larger [customers],” says Rocheleau. “Their doors are being knocked on all the time by other color concentrate houses seeking their business.”

Because of this dedication to servicing customers as efficiently as possible, Rocheleau anticipates F&D establishing itself as a color supplier to small manufacturers, especially via its online platform that’s coming out in November. “We feel that more and more of these small manufacturers are being left behind by competitors because their orders are too small, and color concentrate houses don’t want to invest the time or money to match the colors,” he says.

Often when companies are looking for specific colors for smaller batches of items, whether it’s a toy or medical equipment, they’re unable to get, for instance, a certain color blue, and instead receive a basic blue that’s off-the-shelf.

“That’s because manufacturers have the basic colors and they’re using them all the time,” says Rocheleau. “Our goal is to market ourselves nationally to be able to provide custom color concentrate for the small customer out there, so they can still get the colors they want. We see that as a big market… A big part of the market out there is not driven by large volumes; it’s driven by the unique colors that these different customers want.”

Aside from superior color matching and turnaround time, F&D’s high level of customer service and quality continues to set it apart from other houses, says Rocheleau. As other color houses make more acquisitions and continue to grow larger, there’s an opportunity for F&D to be able to communicate at the customer level, offering better, personalized service than doesn’t involve only large volumes.

To this end, the new online platform’s development plans include reaching out across the country to small manufacturers who may be looking for something specific, unique and anything but basic.

“There are two things,” Rocheleau explains. “A customer in California or Texas needs 50 pounds of a certain blue and he can’t get it anywhere because there are minimum orders of 200 pounds or more but he doesn’t need that much. With F&D, if it’s a stock color he can go online, order it and we’ll ship it out the next day. While we also have some standard colors, our other component is to let these small manufacturers know that we will match their color, we will do the 25-pound order and we’re here to do that for you. You are our customer.”

It’s this kind of specialized service and dedication to nimble thinking that will continue to set F&D apart in the years to come. Rocheleau also makes a point of touching on the team’s resilience to the COVID pandemic, which he feels they managed to handle better than most.

“We were fortunate to not have any stoppages or shutdowns and part of that was we immediately implemented a strict sterile environment mandate,” he explains. ”All touch surfaces were cleaned after each shift; from manufacturing to the office setting, all touchpoints were sanitized at the end of each work day.”

Masks were mandatory as well. “Part of it was luck, but one of the things that helped us get through the pandemic was, in late 2019 we had just completed a staff reduction strategy that we had carried out here in Leominster and in Canada,” he says. “We had too many people in production and in the lab, and we really got our hands around the cost and the excess. We were able to strip that down so it made it easier when COVID hit because we were already at a really efficient level in terms of labor.”

F&D’s drastic change in staffing included revamping the entire management structure to better serve small and medium-size customers. The company replaced its Vice President of production, along with its Lab Manager, the CFO, and the entire the sales team, says Rocheleau. “All those things put us in a position to ride out the COVID-19 storm.”

Along with continuing to deal with the pandemic, F&D has had to weather and adjust to the ongoing raw material price increases and rising shipping rates. “Much of this is COVID-related in some form or another,” Rocheleau says. “A lot of our pigments are coming from China and India, so there are supply-side problems from production to shipping. There are problems at the U.S. docks, and there are not enough workers.”

The company also had to deal with the issues of flooding in Texas that resulted in the decrease of resin production, which continues to be a challenge today.

“We’re told that it won’t be till May or June of next year before these prices kind of settle down,” Rocheleau says. “That’s definitely the obstacle right now – absorbing the price increases, but also our ability to be able to pass on these price increases to our customers.”

Rocheleau is confident that the company’s proven resilience will come through again, however, as it moves forward with its plans to alleviate customers’ frustrations with finding color concentrates at the small order level.

Along with F&D’s ongoing superior color consistency matches, Rocheleau says the timeliness of turnaround times has helped established the company as a go-to business, especially for those smaller orders. “That’s what we’re trying to do with this online platform as well,” he says. “We want to ship the next day for standard colors and provide custom colors for small manufacturers.”

The post The Match Game – F&D Plastics Offers Color Consistency<p class="company">F&D Plastics</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Indeed, “Probably the biggest single change for us has been to focus on productizing,” says LasX President Ryan Falch.

To this end, the company is preparing to launch its first product: FreshFocus, which is a laser system that can be used to create breathable and easy-to-open food and consumer packaging. Also in preparation is LasX’s next configure-to-order laser system, which will serve the folding carton and commercial print markets, featuring the proprietary laser materials processing technology and robotic system offering ultra-fast, highly automated digital finishing.

Branching out into product development
FreshFocus, LasX’s first configure-to-order laser system, will be unveiled in late September at a pair of trade shows: Pack Expo in Las Vegas and Fachpack in Germany. FreshFocus will be sold and serviced worldwide initially to flexible packaging converters.

It is a big move for a technology firm that has excelled as a specialty manufacturer making one-off laser systems for individual clients. LasX’s patented LaserSharp® technology can be used for engraving, perforating, etching, scoring, cutting, and ablating plastics, textiles, abrasives, metalized films, acrylics, adhesives, vinyl, and other flexible materials used in manufacturing applications. The company’s main markets include medical, electronics, automotive, aerospace, packaging, and graphic arts.

LasX’s “journey into packaging,”—leading eventually to the FreshFocus system—began in 2005, says William Dinauer, founder and CEO.

That year, LasX set out to solve an issue that was causing problems with brand owners using flexible packaging such as pouch and flow-wrap packaging. Consumers were fed up with hard-to-open food packages that required scissors or strenuous effort to open. LasX researched, developed, and produced a custom laser-based machine for easy-to-open packaging.

The solution works like this: using a laser, the machine operator creates a weak spot in the plastic packaging film. If a consumer tears at this weak spot, the package easily opens wide.

To promote this innovation, a new company, FlexPak Services (www.flexpakservices.com), was spun off from LasX in 2008. FlexPak, as it is commonly known, was tasked with “delivering easy-to-open and breathable packaging to flexible packaging converters,” says Dinauer.

Breathable packaging—that is, food packaging containing little holes that let in oxygen to keep perishable goods fresh longer—represented another challenge. LasX went to work again and developed a laser solution that “poked very small holes in the plastic film, enabling shelf life to go from one week to three weeks,” notes Dinauer.

Breathable packaging offers enormous benefits in terms of food distribution, shipping, and safety. Customers also appreciate that it makes produce last longer.

FreshFocus can create easy-to-open packaging that is also breathable, making it doubly appealing to flexible packaging firms. FreshFocus is being sold and serviced worldwide through dealers and manufacturing representatives.

LasX has also established a partnership with the Miami firm Karlville. Among other things, Karlville sells slitter-rewinders—machines that slit large rolls of flexible packaging film into many smaller rolls.

Karlville “has partnered with us to demonstrate FreshFocus using their high-end slitter rewinder.” At the end of 2021, FlexPak is installing a FreshFocus system in-house, with the Karlville slitter-rewinder. “This machine will be available for our converter customers to laser process rolls up to 1.8m (71”) wide,” says Dinauer.

LasX’s next laser system developed for the folding carton market offers a zero-setup automated alternative to traditional carton finishing. Using conventional analog or tooling methods, operators “would make a bunch of cartons, finish them, and if the cartons were not used, throw them out,” Falch states.

LasX’s CartonsInMinutes® process integrates LasX’s high-speed laser and robotic part-handling machine, a digital printer, and an inline folder/gluer. “LasX’s patented laser and robot control software coupled with advanced vision technology ensures precise, repeatable, cut-to-print registration and product sorting,” notes Falch. These elements operate in a continuous digital workflow using software that LasX provides.

As the CartonsInMinutes name implies, cartons can be finished in minutes, versus days or weeks when using traditional methods. CartonsInMinutes makes on-demand production possible, in which only the required number of products is manufactured, drastically reducing waste. Job changes can be made by simply entering new programming. Finished parts are removed and sorted by robotic automation.

Growing and diversifying
LasX’s focus on product-oriented manufacturing was inspired in part by the arrival of new leadership.

“Ryan Falch came on board in 2018 as the president of LasX. Ryan said: ‘We’ve got to change how we do the business and diversify from custom machine building.’ While we’re making money and FlexPak is doing really well, custom equipment is very difficult to build and sell. So FreshFocus emerged from 2018 as a development project,” recalls Dinauer.

Designing and then manufacturing custom laser equipment is an expensive, time-consuming process. It can take half a year to get a custom-built laser system to a client, says Dinauer. With its new product line, LasX wants to cut delivery time to less than twenty weeks, he adds.

Still, the company has not completely moved away from its roots. “We’re going to continue doing the custom business for our key accounts and highly specialized applications,” says Falch.

Laser-focused
In keeping with the company’s broadened scope, LasX continues to deploy lasers to modernize the tool and die and textile sectors. While dies are traditionally machined by toolmakers, a designer could create a digital die pattern and then use a laser to cut the pattern in a material. On-demand manufacturing, as it is called, presents a new, highly-efficient, and automated way to cut materials.

“With laser, there’s zero changeover time, the setup time is minimal. They can afford to nest and run several parts in small runs. In digital finishing, everything is instant, so they don’t have to run big batches doing high volume production. They can do short runs with short batches. That’s where laser really, really plays a strong role in manufacturing, because there isn’t the cost of the die and changeover time involved,” adds Falch.

LasX is also spearheading an in-house customer support initiative. Throughout its history, the firm’s technical support staff members have assisted clients with “installations, repairs, maintenance, and preventative maintenance,” says Falch.

The company has launched a new program called ClearCut® to enhance its already commendable customer-service capabilities. This program is “really intended to provide a more proactive approach toward our service,” he says.

ClearCut allows clients “to realize the full potential of their investment in LasX equipment by offering both machine service and materials processing services. We do a health check-up to really look at how a machine is performing. We check our customers’ processes, look for opportunities to help customers improve. We do remote support. We offer spare part discounts, software upgrades, prescheduled process support operator training. All these things are built into the ClearCut program,” Falch adds.

The path ahead
As the company gears up for product launches and proactive customer care, LasX leadership is also looking toward the future. A LasX Europe branch in Germany has been opened for the European market, and there are plans to open a branch in Asia.

“I think Asia would be the natural step, to create a service and sales office similar to LasX Europe,” says Dinauer. “We are already working with a number of equipment manufacturers and key manufacturing accounts worldwide.”

Meanwhile, the company is committed to its new emphasis on configure-to-order laser systems. “We’re going to put more investment on the upfront side: sales, service, customer experience, marketing. We’ll continue to invest in technology, and we’ll continue to stay cutting-edge. That is a big focus for the company so that we will continue to grow,” states Falch.

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