🔒For CT manufacturers, robots, automation technology seen as crucial to addressing labor shortage

When Jeffrey Davis took the reins at New London’s historic Sheffield Pharmaceuticals in 2016, he knew there was one big problem he needed to solve.

“Our production lines were still very manually run with a lot of people,” Davis said in a recent interview. “Quickly, I saw the writing on the wall that it was getting harder to hire people — fewer people wanted to do those sorts of jobs.”

The solution: Automation, facilitated by robotics on the assembly line.

Sheffield Pharma is a small, legacy manufacturing company of the sort that dot Connecticut and provide a huge chunk of the state’s employment and economic output. Back in its first heyday as Dr. Sheffield’s, its claim to fame was as the first company to invent toothpaste, and then sell it in a tube.

While its original brand is still available, the bulk of its business now comes from its role as a contract manufacturer of various products for some of the biggest names in the U.S.

“Walmart, Target, CVS, Walgreens, Publix, Kroger — we do private label for all these companies,” Davis said.

And that lack of a uniform product — the need for flexibility — drove his quest for the perfect packaging line.

“While we mostly make things in tubes and bottles, those can get packaged in a bunch of different ways, a bunch of different sizes,” Davis explained. “Which is why a lot of our equipment does employ robotic arms because they can be more flexible than a giant machine built to do one thing.”

Robotics is a maturing discipline. It’s been around for many decades — the first robotic arm was installed on a factory floor in the 1950s — but like many other technologies, the pace of change has only increased in recent years. That includes the rise of collaborative robots — or cobots — that can work alongside and physically collaborate with humans.

And in Connecticut, the use of robotics and other automation technologies has taken on increased importance within the manufacturing industry as a way to address the ongoing labor shortage.

In fact, robotics is a key part of the state’s manufacturing strategic plan, Make It Here 2030, which was released in April.

It calls on the state to develop a “well-defined and well-funded plan to drive industrial automation across the manufacturing industrial base.”

“It really is driven around the premise that we’re never going to have enough people to get the work done that needs to be done,” Paul Lavoie, Connecticut’s chief manufacturing officer, said of the strategic plan. “We have a workforce shortage in Connecticut. We’ve realized that we’re never going to hire our way out of the problem.”

That means encouraging and even funding automation built around robotics, artificial intelligence and other technologies, as a way to help companies grow.

“I tell every manufacturer, you need two plans on your desk. You need a retention and recruitment plan, but you also need an industrial automation plan,” Lavoie said.

Streamline operations

The big names, like Sikorsky and Pratt & Whitney, have been in this game for many years, progressively integrating robotics into their production lines and maintenance operations, and are now even offering customized robotic solutions to clients.

But Lavoie says he’s encouraged by some of the creativity he sees among small and medium-size players as well.

“At Sargent Manufacturing (in New Haven), which is part of Assa Abloy, they actually have cobots working with punch presses that were made in the 50s and 60s,” Lavoie said. “So, they’ve taken very old technology and adapted robotics to move the parts along the cycle of operations. All you have to do is have a worker to load raw material and then take the finished product off.”

That sounds like a recipe for a declining human workforce, one of the biggest concerns that particularly labor unions have with automation. But Lavoie once again stresses that these are often jobs that companies were having difficulty filling to begin with.

He’s also bullish on his vision of robots allowing for upskilling of their human colleagues.

“These jobs that we’re automating, we’re moving people from lower-paying jobs into higher-paying jobs,” he said, citing companies that have lowered their headcount but actually raised their total payroll. “And so, from a tax-dollar perspective, there’s actually more money coming into Connecticut, but there’s fewer jobs there.”

And the state also offers help with the switch to automation through its Manufacturing Innovation Fund, which can provide companies with up to $100,000 in non-dilutive grant funding for the purchase of equipment.

Lavoie has called on state lawmakers to replenish the depleting fund with at least $100 million over the next six years.

Overall, automation adoption is far from universal. A recent survey by the Connecticut Business & Industry Association found that of the Connecticut manufacturers that are planning to make changes to their workforce in the near future, 43% expect to add more employees, while 18% plan to invest in automation to streamline operations and increase efficiency, and 9% are considering adopting artificial intelligence applications to enhance capabilities and drive innovation.

But those who have made the switch are often evangelists for this new way of doing business.

Shelley Fasano, the CEO of Dymotek, an injection molding specialist in Ellington, told the audience at a recent manufacturing summit in Hartford that automation is now at the forefront of any new customer relationship.

“We’re starting at the beginning with every new product launch,” she said. “Before we would start by saying ‘we’ll throw labor at it and then we’ll automate over time.’ And now we will not take in business that we cannot automate, because we will not be successful.”

Man & Machine

Sam Greenbank, a manufacturing applications engineer at the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology (CCAT) in East Hartford, said the conception of what robots can do, and where they can be useful, has changed considerably over the last two decades.

“Most automated projects or robotic processes in the past were based around a hard automation or fixed automation,” Greenbank said “That’s characterized by a machine that’s built to do a specific task. If that task changes, you need to rebuild the system.”

These were the classic robotic assembly lines that became typical in the automotive industry in the 1980s. Today, robots are built with adaptability in mind, Greenbank said.

“Instead of doing one task and one task only over the entire lifespan of the robot,” he said, “the idea is instead to make the robot as adaptable as possible so that it can be used for one task, or it can be used for a different task every day.”

That means they can be used for short-run production of just a few hundred, or even a few dozen, parts or packaging tasks, before being quickly and easily reprogrammed.

That kind of low-volume, high-mix manufacturing is something that’s far more typical of the aerospace businesses that form the backbone of Connecticut’s small and medium-sized machine shops.

Even newly adaptable as they are, these kinds of industrial robots are still kept strictly segregated from humans on the factory floor, usually behind cages, because of the danger of injury.

But they’ve been joined in many industries by collaborative robots, like the ones being used by Sargent Manufacturing in New Haven. They’re designed to work “alongside of humans, to serve as an assistant, doing jobs that are more human-centric, using human tools, using more human logic, as opposed to computerized work code,” Greenbank said.

They’re built with safety in mind. Cobots have sensors and force-sensitive feedback designed to stop them if they come into contact with a human colleague, he said.

They’re also much easier to program — many of them can learn new tasks simply by being physically manipulated by the people they’re working with.

“The downside to these is, to be safe, they must be slow,” said Greenbank. “They’re typically not built for the same level of ruggedized infrastructure as industrial robots; their payload is much less, so they’re only good for light-duty tasks.”

Nevertheless, they’re becoming more prevalent in industrial settings, doing things like loading parts in and out of machine tools or molds — robotic machine-tending.

They’re even more common — for big companies ubiquitous — in warehouse settings. Greenwich-based logistics company GXO caused a stir recently with the implementation of a humanoid robot called Digit that it’s using to move heavy loads from mobile robotic carts to conveyors at one of its fulfillment centers in Georgia.

The company is also piloting two other humanoid robot models for logistics functions alongside its human workforce.

CCAT’s Greenbank is dubious about the use-case for humanoid robots in manufacturing’s more complex environments — at least just yet.

“They’re coming,” he said. “Personally, I don’t think they’re going to be industrially relevant for at least another decade or two. There’s too much that they have to solve.”

Automation ROI

Because of the complex and often unique nature of the tasks, most robotics solutions don’t come ready off the shelf for manufacturing operations. That means automating a process can be a lengthy and expensive investment, involving customizing a suite of technologies for the precise use case.

CCAT principal engineer Nasir Mannan spends a lot of his time breaking this down for company executives who are trying to make smart choices. Often, he says, firms will bring in the actual parts they need to manipulate to run through CCAT’s demonstration set-ups.

“They’re trying to see what the value is of adding automation,” he said. “We have systems here at CCAT that are either existing in place, or we quickly mock up with the robotics that we have so that we can show them what value that robotic system can give them.”

He can then walk them through an estimated cost and time to implement what they need, and also how long it would take to retrain their workforce around that system.

“So, that translates to an ROI,” Mannan said.