Inaugural Talking Industry digital broadcast tackles key manufacturing issues

04 August, 2020

He agreed with Mistry that in the future there will be significant changes in production methods. “Obviously, social distancing will mean there will potentially be fewer people on factory floors,” Jones added. “But if we can automate, and we can make things more efficient, we can hopefully negate this. AM and the Industry 4.0 mean that we can potentially have factories that are largely unmanned. "

Control Techniques, owned by the Japanese company Nidec, has production plants in Shenzhen and Miami, as well as here in North Wales. “We were hit very early - one minute we were talking about Brexit and the next minute that was all forgotten and we were into a pandemic, which was quite a gear change,” said UK President Tony Pickering. “Shenzhen is the Silicon Valley area of Chinese manufacturing, and one of the first business areas to be locked down - but luckily also one of the first to be unlocked.

"The Chinese got a grasp of CoVID really quickly - we worked very closely with the Chinese Government and I was communicating with them through our local managers,” he said. “We had to build a dormitory overnight for people, hot and cold running water, showers, beds, everything. If anybody was infected or showing symptoms, they couldn't leave the factory.”

But that was just the beginning: “Then obviously, Boris announced the lockdown in the UK in late March. I came into work on the Monday and there was a lot of anxiety about what ‘essential work’ meant. We took a straw poll and sent all 700 staff home because people were just super-nervous. And then we spent the next three weeks laying out the factories in a socially distanced way. This is where we got headlined on the BBC News - we are now part of the Government guidelines. We've got shift patterns, one-way systems, shielding, even handles on toilet doors operated by your feet!”

“And now we've got the same situation in our Miami factory,” Pickering continued. “This is a bigger challenge, because the way the US are running their society - we have social distancing to the nth degree in the factory, yet you can walk out of the factory premises and you're into a bar or onto the beach!"

The theme of remote working and the automated factory was taken up by Novatec’s Sean Robinson. "Novatec spent the first two weeks of the formal lockdown period and a week or so before that in planning sessions with customers concerned about continuity and disaster recovery,” he stated. “Many had general fears about how to keep their business running and who could be in the plant.”

In the last couple of months, Robinson has noted an acceleration towards automation, with customers taking weeks and months to approve development projects that used to take months and years. "These journeys are essentially what we would have recommended as good business practice to enhance productivity, cost savings and flexibility, and to enable faster decision-making when dealing with something like COVID. People are also finding ways of managing a factory from afar, whether fishing by a riverbank, stuck at home, actually in the office.”