The intelligent combination of technology and the human worker is a winning move in the war for … [+] manufacturing talent.
The winning move in fighting against the structural manufacturing talent gap will be a marriage of people development and technology in both the factory and the office. If American industry plays it right, it will herald a new era of U.S. competitiveness and productivity.
There are numerous solutions on offer for the triple whammy of the falling numbers of workers available as Baby Boomers retire, the loss of the embedded know-how those retirees take with them, and the lack of skills to replace them due to our country’s devaluation of industrial careers and skilled trades in recent decades. They variously address either the numbers gap through automation, or the skills gap through employee reskilling. Individually, they are excellent and much-needed measures to address the challenges.
Technology and talent combined
But the intelligent combination of talent and technology is where the power lies. That’s one of the messages from Jeannine Kunz, Chief Workforce Development Officer at SME, who will take over in the new year as CEO of the nonprofit formerly known as the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, which represents all of North American industry, including manufacturers, academia, professionals, students and the communities in which they operate.
“When you are adopting technology and it’s not one or the other, it doesn’t replace jobs in the sense of your job might change or this job might go away, but it created this other new job, that takes a lot of good leadership, communication and thoughtfulness to your workforce,” she said. “I think the flip side is organizations really starting to look at, what does that mean? What kind of skills do I need? Talent, data science, data analytics—you know, everything around data obviously becomes very, very critical… I would just say, first and foremost, make sure talent management is part of your key KPI strategies.”
Automation buy-in from your team
Scott Slovell, president and CEO of SmithCo in Le Mars, Iowa, took that approach with a recent automation project. The company, which produces side dump trailers for industries such as construction, mining and agriculture, is experiencing substantial demand growth but struggles to get the skilled workers it needs.
“Right now, we’re doing about 500 trailers a year,” Slovell said. “Next year, we’re expecting to do 600 plus. And we can do 700 a year, just fine, within factory that we have… The big problem with getting to 700 is, where do we find the people? We were looking at what our growth potential was, what our plan for growth is, and we came to the conclusion that the people just aren’t here for us to be able to achieve our goals.”
An example of automated welding, the solution SmithCo chose to address its skilled worker shortages.
The team identified welding as a critical bottleneck. “We have these long trailers, and they’re basically two different components in the trailer, the frame and the dump body, which we call the tub,” Slovell explained. “And the tub has a very, very long seam. Our guys can do that all day long. But is that the best use of their skills? Well, robots can… show up every day and do the same quality, the same speed, no matter how they feel… So we made the jump and spent the money and had the cell installed last November.”
The team anticipated the potential difficulties the workers might have with the decision. “The thing that we had to overcome when we first went down this road was the perception of the employees that we’re going to force people out,” said Slovell. “We made a promise to them that nobody will lose a job because we brought automation in. You may not be doing the same welding job or the same painting job as you did before, but even if we automate our paint line, we still need people that know how to paint.”
Tech help for front-line workers
In addition to automating rote, difficult, or dangerous work to free humans to specialize in higher-level tasks, technology also offers assistance for the workers themselves. One example is Augie, the connected worker platform from Augmentir of Horsham, Pennsylvania. Founded in 2018, the tech startup serves customers such as Colgate, Mondelez, and BASF. Augie focuses on increasing the productivity and quality of processes involving front-line workers by digitizing and optimizing key tasks.
“Now there’s 15, 20 petabytes of data coming from connected machines in the industrial setting today,” said Chris Kuntz, VP of marketing for Augmentir. “But most manufacturers have little, no data on the humans that are in the factory or doing work out in the field. And so we built an AI platform that can augment humans and then capture data on how humans are working, so you can then proactively support them and provide better guidance and support. And so it initially launched like a gen AI chat bot where workers can ask questions. ‘Hey, how do I perform a filler changeover?’ Or, ‘I’m running into a problem—I got a jam on the packer on line five, and it’s giving me an error code.’ Auggie can then go into the corporate knowledge base and say, here’s the information you need.”
Beyond to helping with the knowledge problem, Augie assists with language barriers as well. “Even though the information that it’s retrieving, a troubleshooting guide for a toothpaste making machine—because Colgate is a big customer of ours—that information may exist in English, Augie knows to translate it to Vietnamese, because that’s the context of the worker, the user that is asking the question,” Kuntz explained.
The workforce challenge is a long-term structural one. Part of the integrated technology and team approach will be inviting workers to offer their own solutions. “I was in a meeting yesterday where someone said, ‘Well, you know, maybe I’m talking myself out of a job,’” said Kunz. “And I thought one of the best comments I could think of was that person felt safe to do it, confident enough in their abilities to do something else for our organization.”
When workers can offer their own jobs to be automated, confident that a higher-level position will be created and available to them, that’s a powerful combination indeed.
