[00:00:00] Speaker A: Often with automation, there's a temptation to prioritize the most challenging things in your plant and that's not the right way to go about it.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Hello everyone, and welcome to the robot industry podcast. My guest for this edition is Ben Whitney and he's president of Armo Tool and a booma manufacturing in London. Ben Whitney is the third generation leader of Armo Tool, founded by George and Ross Whitney in 1969. Soon after graduation from U of Toronto, he became a full time employee at Armo Tool, where he has worked on a casual basis since age 14. Ben worked as PlC programmer, die designer and project manager before taking on the role of president in 2008. He earned his master's degree in mechanical engineering from Western University. And Ben, welcome to the podcast. I'm glad you're here.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Thanks Jim. I'm excited to be here.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: We're going to talk a little bit about some of the big challenges in North America manufacturing. And I think the big one is that I feel, and you probably feel as well, that we don't use enough automation.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I would agree. If we're trying to compete with lower cost jurisdictions, then automation is the way to do that. And everywhere I go, people are talking about shortage of talent and the way to address that is with automation.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: And so when we were kind of talking a little bit earlier about where Canada stands in manufacturing, we are probably in the world, in the top 20 companies, but I think we can do much better. And we're going to talk a little bit about an automation roadmap.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: That's right. An automation roadmap is like a plan that sets out the goals and priorities of your company.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: And have you done like you've done hundreds of automation projects? Have you ever done an automation roadmap with a customer or for a customer?
[00:01:53] Speaker A: We've been a partner in developing automation roadmaps. It's one of those things where it really needs to be done by the manufacturer themselves, but with our expertise, we can help to set them in the right direction.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: And so what are some of the steps that you take in creating this roadmap?
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Often with automation, there's a temptation to prioritize the most challenging things in your plant. If I could take this really problematic operation process machine and make it flawless, wouldn't that be great? So we'll just get a robot to do that, and that's not the right way to go about it. What you want to do is prioritize early wins and look for processes that are really under control. That's where something is most suited for automation so when we're building the roadmap, what we're looking at is do I need more throughput, less labor, improved quality? Am I trying to free up plant floor space so that we can put new customer projects into the plant? We want to get everybody on the same page, whether it's finance or quality or manufacturing and sales of what it is that we're trying to accomplish. And then we can start to identify which processes, machines, areas of the plant impact those criteria the most. And because we have a roadmap, we can make sure that we're spending money on the right things from dollar one, for instance. If we have a machine that we're going to build, that's going to do five processes, but there's a likelihood of wanting to add a 6th or 7th process later, then we might build a machine that has what you call an idle station. So there's room inside of the machine to add more processes later that either you don't need or it's too expensive to do right away. It's not in this year's budget. But think about how much better that is than having your brand new half million dollar machine. It's been running for a year and you go man, I wish this thing would run twice as fast, or I wish it would also vision inspect the end of the part. While there's no room to add that now, I mean for 2% of the price of the machine, you could have built in the space to do that. So that's why it needs some forethought.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: I often think of a dial table that I would have built in my early years in automation, where you exactly do that, you leave two stations idle so that you can build on something down the road.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Yeah, dial table is a great example. We used to do it all the time in stamping dies. In stamping dies. We've kind of gotten away from idle stations because simulation is so good that you're much more confident of how the part is going to work. But in a piece of automation, like a dial table or a transfer machine, it's still very true. And quality requirements only go up. Part complexity only goes up.
Oh well, next year they're going to want to run the convertible version on here and we're going to need to add a couple of operations. You don't want to have to build a whole new assembly line for that slightly different variant.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: So maybe I've got an empty factory, or maybe we're just starting up a company and I want to create this automation roadmap.
I want to kind of think, why is this so important?
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Wow. Well, I think all of us are experiencing how fast technology is changing today. And even if you've got the budget to fill a brand new factory from day one, like, let's say you're Volkswagen and you're setting up this new battery factory in southwestern Ontario, so you're not planning to start production till 2027. But in the meantime, all your smart guys in the lab are busy designing better batteries, right? And you've got a plant that's going to take 20 years to pay back. So you really need to have some foresight into if this were to change, if the product we're making were to change, how would that be, and what would that look like? And, okay, today, what information do I want about how my machinery is running? What information do I want on the shop floor? What information do I want in the supervisor's office? What information do I want at the corporate office in Germany? And you know full well that that's only going to increase, right. You're going to want more traceability. You're going to want to be able to see a ton of manufacturing information about temperature and torque readings and weights and test data.
So maybe what you're doing is you're building Plc or PC capacity so that you have lots of more bandwidth to be able to do that industry 4.0 mes system work later. Or maybe you're as simple as thinking about, well, if this product, if everyone goes to the lower end battery, how are we going to double capacity there? Oh, if the low end battery is obsolete, how are we going to double capacity the high end battery? And then, of course, supply chain complexity of, well, we can't get any lithium this year, so what are we going to do now? So there's a ton of complexity. In a way, a greenfield project is almost more complicated than just tackling an existing factory and saying, well, what's our five year improvement? Automation roadmap.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: So who all is involved in crafting this document? I mean, in a perfect world, a company would come to you, Volkswagen would call up armo and say, hey, armo, we need your help.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's good for a company to do a little bit of thinking about priorities on its own, but not get too far down the road without talking to an automation integrator.
We're working on a project now where the customer wants to package a variety of products at high speed, and they don't have a very good understanding of, well, what would it cost to run a second shift if I can't afford a machine that runs this fast. And what is the impact? If we could, instead of running twelve skus, what if we just pick the four that are the big runners, what would that look like? And so they have a budget that's not appropriate for the scope that they want. And the sooner that we can be involved and start to say, well, jeepers, what you're talking about sounds like two and a half million dollars. Oh, well, what we're talking about only pays for $1 million. Okay, well, so before you go to finance and get $1 million approved, let's talk about what can we take out on the scope?
What are the key problems we want to address, and maybe what operations are really tricky for automation and costing you a lot of money that are appropriate to leave as manual for the time being.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: It's funny how we sometimes all talk about automation, and every once in a while somebody says, you know, for this 20% of the needs you have and for the budget you have, manual actually can work.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: Yeah, humans are still good at a lot of things, especially when you start to want to automate parts that are inconsistent or squashy in any kind of way, parts that are difficult to fixture. At the same time, it's good to keep talking to automation experts because the technology is moving so fast. We used to think of automated welding as really only being appropriate for high volume. You need at least 15,000 units or something. And now there are collaborative robot welders. There's robot welding that's vision guided. So the cobot welder needs very consistent parts, right? The gap needs to be consistent. Okay, well, I've got parts where the gap isn't consistent. Well, now you've got robots where they're feeling the gap with the wire. That's not that new. But then there's ones that are vision guided and laser guided. And as we start to see AI, which in many ways is just code for better software, once we see AI guiding the weld, all of a sudden applications that were really suitable for manual not that long ago, I expect to see them be candidates for automation.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: And so this is a complex kind of discussion. And the automation roadmap. So who owns the document that would.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: Be 100% owned by the customer?
At Armo, we're really looking to create customer partnerships where it's a long term relationship, and we're supporting customers with automation today, tooling tomorrow, perhaps in depth service the day after that. And then we want to be there when they're ready to implement the next year of that automation roadmap.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: And have you seen success in doing this?
[00:10:25] Speaker A: Yeah, we have. Occasionally we've been asked to do an engineering study, and we have been paid to do component of an automation roadmap. But often customers are coming to us and they're working on the scope or spec for one particular machine. And then through those conversations, we kind of uncover, well, how are you doing the operation upstream and downstream of this machine? And does it make sense to actually tie all those machines together? And that's how we kind of start having more of an automation roadmap conversation instead of an individual project conversation.
And there's risks that need to be discussed. If you're doing seven operations inside one machine, or you have seven individual machines each doing one operation, well, the supermachine has a lot less material handling, and it's going to probably take up a lot less floor space, and it's much more of a one piece flow, kind of lean manufacturing. Great. But now you have a machine that's potentially quite complex and potentially difficult to access because it's so big for maintenance. So if your plant is in a jurisdiction where it's really hard to get experienced, skilled technical help, maybe you want those simpler machines.
If one of those seven machines goes down, we can run a bank in front of it, we can run out the bank behind it. Our customer doesn't feel that there's an outage for a couple of days, and now we only have to bring in one operator to run that problematic machine on second shift. If your giant do everything machine goes down, you can get into a lot of trouble. So you want to think about the pros and cons. We've recently been reminded of the dangers of delivering a solution to a customer that is beyond their capabilities. Sometimes customers come to us and they say, we want a robot sell. And we say, well, what brand of robot do you prefer to work with? And they say, oh, we don't care. And I used to think, oh, this is great, because we can drive that based on our expertise and the best pricing. But I've actually learned that that's actually a flashing red warning light, because what it means is we have no robot experience, we have no ability to modify a program. We don't have any spare parts inventory, and we have nobody who knows how to reset a robot if the power flickers.
We have to be a little bit cautious about delivering solutions that are the fanciest machine in the plant.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that is one of those. How much experience do you have? Customer with automation because I think in some of my experiences that they look to automate, like you said earlier, the most complex thing in the plant, and that's absolutely the wrong way to do it, right? Look around in complex, simple things like talk to your operators.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: Yes.
And talking about this complex machine, it's kind of like if you were buying electronics for your parents, right? Would you buy the tv that doesn't even have a remote, that's voice access only, that it has every bell and whistle in the world? Or would you be like, I want a big remote control that's only got six buttons on it, nice and simple.
Or do you want to have a bank of 20 different remote controls laid over the coffee table to run all these different things?
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I know the answer to that one. So how different is the automation roadmap from a specification document?
[00:14:01] Speaker A: A specification document or request for, quote, request for proposal that's really focused on one machine, and we are trained to stay within the scope that that is. Talking about an automation roadmap is more holistic.
And by involving a broad cross sectional team, that's when you start to go, well, manufacturing thinks their job is to pump more parts out, but maybe quality is saying, well, actually, if we could reduce scrap, that would have a much bigger impact. And sales is going well. Actually, we were going to stop selling that product in three months anyways.
And finance is going well, I can pay for this. If you can make it run a lower grade of steel or different type of plastic, then I don't even care if you make more or faster or whatever.
So you kind of unearth those different goals and get that broad view that then tells you, okay, we think we want to build a request for quote around machine XYZ or process ABC.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: And so it sounds like when I was going to ask you who should all be involved. Well, you've got finance, you've got quality, you've got manufacturing, you've got applications. Is there anybody who we haven't like maybe health and safety and safety maintenance?
[00:15:24] Speaker A: Sure.
And anytime we're implementing equipment or solutions in our own facility, the more buy in you have, the better, right? And even if people don't have too much to say when they're in the planning room, they come out and go, well, they asked me, I was part of choosing that solution. And then when it comes in and there's the inevitable growing pains of getting it to work, at least this isn't something you did to them, it's something that we did together.
I was going to say as with any kind of lean initiative. You never want to translate automation into labor cuts. When you're dealing with your shop floor team or buy in of that, automation will come to a quick halt.
We all have a fair bit of turnover and retirees in our operations, so there's room to just let attrition kind of reduce your personnel requirements without saying, oh, we brought in this piece of automation and you six people are fired.
Automation should really be about taking away the projects or the jobs that people don't want to do because they're boring and they're repetitive and should be creating new roles in setup, in quality, in planning that allow us to absorb the personnel.
Yeah, what do you think? Was that okay?
[00:16:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. Did I ask this question already about what kinds of things should be on the roadmap? Like, we've talked a little bit about maybe there's dunnage and material flow and types of robots.
Are those some of the elements?
[00:17:02] Speaker A: Yes, those are elements I want to go right back to. Maybe you do a value stream map, right? And then as you go through the value stream, you figure out, well, what's the impact if this was done better, and then understand what everybody means by better.
If you walk the shop floor and you find a spot where a lot of people are gathered in one spot and they seem to be doing a really repetitive job, often if you've got a position that's got a lot of turnover because people don't want to do that job, that's sort of the workforce telling you that maybe there's an opportunity for automation there.
Packaging can be one of those places.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: Is there anything that shouldn't be on the roadmap?
[00:17:50] Speaker A: I would try and avoid having an overly focus on headcount reduction in the automation roadmap and really make it about throughput and quality and floor space savings, it's okay to say we're going to have a reduction in headcount when we bring in this piece of automation. And often there's over reliance on that when it comes to payback period kind of calculations. But at the same time, I would argue that you need to have right on the roadmap. Well, where are those people going to? And that helps to build excitement within the plant of like, hey, if we can figure out how to put this widget into the box and close the box, then actually I won't have to tape boxes closed for the rest of my life, right?
[00:18:39] Speaker B: No, I think it's a really good point. And that goes to the culture of automation, especially for those companies that are just bringing in automation and don't have any idea of where to start.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: In the canadian market, I think we have an extra challenge because most companies tend to be a little smaller than in the states, and we tend to be doing a bigger variety of products in one factory just because our marketplace is smaller. And then that variety of products tends to make automation more difficult. And that vicious circle then drives lower productivity, which drives a weaker dollar, which makes it hard to invest in automation.
So the good news is robotics, vision systems, processing systems are changing and getting better so fast that even for a company that maybe looked at automation a few years ago and couldn't quite achieve their goals, it's worth having a look again.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: Ben, when do you start an automation roadmap?
[00:19:37] Speaker A: Well, Jim, it's like planting a tree. The best time was 30 years ago, but the next best time is today.
It's always a good time to start building your automation roadmap. It should be part of your annual planning process.
[00:19:49] Speaker B: Absolutely. I totally agree with you. And have we talked about anything? Is there anything we haven't covered?
[00:19:54] Speaker A: No, I think we did a good job of covering it. You asked all the right questions. Jim.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: Hey, how can people get in touch with you if they want to find out more about you or about armo?
Sorry. How can people get in touch with you and find out more about armo?
[00:20:07] Speaker A: You can check us out on the
[email protected] you can look me up on LinkedIn Ben Whitney, and you can email us at
[email protected] well, thanks for coming on today.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: I enjoyed the conversation. I hope we have more about this. It's such an important topic.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: Thank you for your interest, Jim.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: I'd like to thank and acknowledge our partner a three the association for Advancing Automation. They're the leading trade association in the world for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors, and the artificial intelligence technologies. Visit automate.org to learn more. And if you'd like to get in touch with us at the robot industry podcast, you can find me Jim Barretta on LinkedIn. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. Today's podcast was produced by customer attraction Industrial Marketing. And I'd like to thank our team, Chris Gray for music, Jeffrey Bremner for audio production, and my business partner Janet.
