David is joined by Nate Smith to discuss automation in a workforce that is reduced either by reluctance to work in a pandemic, or other deciding factors facing today’s industries. #BlackbirdTV
About this segment of Blackbird TV
Guest: Nate Smith, Owner, Absolute Group of Companies. To learn more about our guest, visit AbsoluteMachinery.com, or call 508-792-4305.
Recorded: October 21, 2020
Published: April 27, 2021
Segment transcript
Talking with Nate Smith at Absolute Machinery. The visibility of the danger of offshoring pretty much everything in our country in this Covid epidemic has, I think it’s brought it so much to the forefront, I think American manufacturing is going to come back in a huge way in the next 10 years. That’s provided people like to work, and can find capable people. That’s why we actually have an automation division. We have a company here in the northeast that wouldn’t even be interested in a suction cup, and that’s an apparatus that’s at the end of a robot, unless it’s a mechanical arm and some other apparatuses we use for what we call end-of-arm tooling, but uh you know what’s fascinating is our customer called up earlier this year with this Covid developments and people are calling in sick, and we were able to send two sales engineers and work with the client, and the team at Absolute Robot showed the ROI for that particular application. I visited this customer yesterday, and it was fascinating because the machines are running and the applications are…he’s ordering two more robots and that’s a Cartesian 3-axis robot. We also will have 6-axis robots. Outside of the time this is filmed pandemically, I go back as far as I can think in the past 10 years, I haven’t been into a factory where the management hasn’t said that one of their largest challenges is a workforce, so automation certainly helps that. Not only does automation address that it actually provides a solution, but we still need people, and it’s good paying jobs, and it’s just trying to make that all make sense. We also have applications where we ship robots into companies and they stand around and they didn’t take steps to educate or provide a point person, and there’s no success there. Success starts from the bottom up, and the top down and everybody get together and make it make it work. You got to you know there’s got to be ownership. Fabulous, fantastic information, Nate thanks for your help today. Thanks, David.