Category Archives: Manufacturing

Rise of the Robots

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APRIL 1, 2014

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robots industrial

“The exponential growth in the power of silicon chips, digital sensors and high-bandwidth communications improves robots just as it improves all sorts of other products,” writes The Economist’s special report (March 29-April 4, 2014).  Three other factors are also at play.

One is that robotics R&D is getting easier. New shared standards make good ideas easily portable from one robot platform to another. A robot like Rethink Robotics’s Baxter, with two arms and easy, intuitive programming interface, would have been barely conceivable 10 years ago. Now you can buy one for $25,000. A second factor is investment. (The biggest robot news of 2013 was that Google bought eight promising robot startups.) The third factor is imagination. In the past few years, clever companies have seen ways to make robots work as grips on film sets and panel installers at solar-power plants. Aerial robots—drones– let farmers tend their crops in new ways, give viewers and broadcasters new perspectives on events, monitor traffic and fires, look for infrastructure in need of repair, and more.

While society may benefit greatly, robots’ growing competence may make some human labor redundant. Aetheon’s Tugs, for instance, which take hospital carts where they are needed, are ready to take over much of the work that porters do today. Kiva’s warehouse robots make it possible for Amazon to send out more parcels with fewer workers. Click here to watch a great 3 minute video on Amazon’s robots. Driverless cars could displace millions of people employed behind the wheel today.

The advent of robots that are cheap and safe enough to be used outside big factories is one reason for a resurgence of interest in robotics over the past few years.  Foxconn, a Taiwanese company that manufactures and assembles electronics, is aiming to robotize much of its operation with hundreds of thousands of its own relatively cheap Foxbots.  Car companies use the lion’s share of industrial robots; they account for over 50% of robot installations in the U.S.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

The Barcode’s Intelligent New Rival

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MARCH 24, 2014

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Thin film technology

In June 1974 history was made at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, with a ten-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. It was the first time a commercial item bearing a Universal Product Code was scanned by a cashier at the checkout. Forty years on, the barcode has transformed the world of commerce by providing reliable product identification, tracking and pricing. Nearly everything now comes with a barcode.

As revolutionary as it was, the barcode has limited abilities, reports The Economist (March 8, 2014). It can impart only the information it was printed with and that can be read by an optical device. The next generation of labeling contains tiny printable electronics able to generate, store and share information. The technology behind “smart labels” is a flexible film of electronics that can be printed like a barcode. The memory circuits which can be used by smart labels to store information are printed as a film of ferroelectric polymer sandwiched between two electrodes. A tiny 20-bit memory label can store over 1 million combinations.

Yet another advancement is called Near Field Communication (NFC). This allows a user to tap an NFC tag with a portable device, like a smartphone, to send or receive data. NFC is a more sophisticated version of RFID and is already used by some contactless payment systems. By incorporating NFC, smart labels will be able to communicate wirelessly. Besides conveying product codes, applications include recording storage times and temperatures for perishable goods like food and pharmaceuticals. Smart labels might even be programmed to automatically discount their prices in response to marketing campaigns. To gain widespread use, smart labels will need to be cheap. Basic printed-memory labels can be produced for around 2 cents. Printed sensor-labels cost 50 cents, compared with $10 or more for a system using conventional microelectronics.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

 

Outsourcing Auto Workers at Nissan

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MARCH 23, 2014

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Nissan's truck line in Tennessee

Nissan, the first of many foreign automakers to set up shop in Tennessee, is leading a trend, writesThe Washington Post (March 9, 2014).Companies from Amazon to Asurion to Dell have outsourced their warehouses and call centers to the hundreds of staffing agencies that have cropped up in the region. Tennessee went from having 51,867 temporary workers in 2009 to 80,990 in 2012, while median wages have stayed flat. Temps make up 3.1% of all jobs in the state.

Tennessee holds its low unemployment rate up as a shining example of success in the global economy — the return of American manufacturing after decades of decline, and the future of work for those left jobless by globalization and technological change. Nissan was Tennessee’s first major investment by a foreign automaker, and has since attracted a constellation of suppliers that support thousands more jobs. Since the plant opened in 1983, the town of Smyrna has grown from 8,000 to 41,000. In the plant’s first 2 decades, getting a Nissan job was like winning the lottery.

But Nissan’s brush with bankruptcy in 2001 and a turnaround plan that involved new models and much lower production costs led to using temps into front-office functions. In 2007-2008, Nissan reduced its permanent workforce by 1/3. As demand returned, it started to backfill production jobs with contractors, too — first on the “pick line,” where workers run parts up to assembly, and then throughout the plant. Now a majority of its 7,000-person workforce is supplied by staffing agencies.

Many work for Yates Services, an in-house contractor that’s hired thousands of people over the past few years to ramp up production. Yates is like a company within a company, with separate bulletin boards, rules and procedures. The bona fide Nissan employees are easily recognizable through their logoed shirts, which Yates workers don’t receive. Yates pays between $10 and $18 an hour, which is about half what Nissan employees make. The gap in benefits is equally wide.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.