“It’s a race now”: Casting off the ‘Dirty, Dangerous & Dull’ with cobots

The skills gap is one of the biggest problems facing industry today. How can automation help to overcome this challenge?

The post-Brexit, mid-pandemic world has put particular pressure on manufacturing companies, particularly SMEs, who haven’t got free access to available labour. We talk about the three ‘D jobs’: the Dirty, Dangerous and Dull – if you can take these away from people and let them concentrate on more valuable tasks, the robots can take the strain and fill the gap that way. Our robots are a way of empowering people.

Apart from helping to tackle the skills gap, how does automation help businesses to stay competitive, particularly during the current COVID-19 crisis? 

Automation will give you a fixed cost, whereas labour costs are only going to increase over the next few years. If you pay a certain amount of money for the first robot, after it’s paid for itself within about nine to 12 months, it’s earned enough to buy another robot for a different part of the process within another year. As robots are so repeatable, they can carry out tasks more efficiently than people, so you make less scrap. Robots can also work throughout the night – something that most human workers don’t want to do – which means they can increase your productivity. So, those are the main benefits: increasing productivity, fixing your costs and, once the robot has paid for itself, earning you money...

Read the full article in DPA's November issue