Balancing quality with growth is just one of the issues Rockwell Automation’s Bill Sarver says are driving automotive manufacturers to use more technology.
The automotive industry faces continuing challenges in 2023, including workforce issues, changing consumer demand, and advancing technology. Rockwell Automation’s recent State of Smart Manufacturing Report: Automotive Edition explores the ways manufacturing leaders are tackling these challenges.
In the report, respondents identified external and internal obstacles, such as balancing quality and growth, onboarding new employees and the microchip shortage. Overwhelmingly, when asked how they plan to mitigate these risks, the respondents indicated adopting new technology was a big part of the plan.
Engineering.com caught up with Bill Sarver, Global Director, Smart Manufacturing – Automotive/EV, Battery & Tire at Rockwell Automation to get his take on the technology manufacturers are leaning on to tackle the top 5 issues identified in the report.
Balancing quality with profitable growth
Manufacturers in the automotive sector identified the need to balance quality with profitable growth as their number one internal challenge in both 2022 and 2023. 43% of automotive manufacturing leaders believe this was their biggest internal obstacle in 2022 and 40% expect this to continue in 2023. How can auto manufacturers balance quality with profitable growth through automation and leveraging technology?
According to Sarver, a cloud-based quality management system (QMS) is one technology solution that can make a significant impact here. While PLM, ERP and MES systems are a popular investment choice for automotive manufacturers, Sarver says the quality department is often overlooked. “When it comes to quality, it’s like the last frontier for investment,” he said.
A cloud-based QMS adds value by unifying manual or siloed systems and integrating them with the business, making areas for improvement more accessible and visible. This enables monitoring, management and corrective action, which improving process quality. “A cloud-based QMS enables users to simplify the whole development, maintenance and management of systems over time to improve efficiency, reduce manpower and improve profitability, while ensuring no-go products aren’t going out the door,” said Sarver. “And by the way, QMS is not anywhere near as expensive as an ERP or PLM system is—it’s fractions of that. You can get all this huge value out of a [relatively] small investment.”
Workforce issues
Respondents highlighted two critical workforce-related challenges: Onboarding new employees (39%) and worker retention (38%), both of which ranked in the top five concerns around growth in 2023. The workforce is critical to the industry’s growth. How can automation and technology be leveraged to onboard and retain employees?
By creating a learning culture that extends training throughout an employee’s journey with the company, retention challenges can be mitigated as employees feel engaged, with an understanding of their opportunities for advancement.
“People come to you with a certain bias and skillset,” said Sarver. “You have to form them to your operating standards, train them to the requirements and make sure they’re certified to the capabilities you need, and then to transition from level to level.”
Rockwell’s Associate Management System aids organizations in managing these training and upskilling needs by laying out certifications, training schedules and timing to ensure training takes place. According to Sarver, virtual training plays an important role in achieving training goals. “If you’re getting a new piece of equipment, you can train employees remotely or virtually on the equipment, rather than waiting for the piece of equipment to show up. Let’s take a week or two out of that deployment time to start production, by doing it virtually.”
In addition to virtual training methods such as video, newer tech offers more immersive learning, such as VR and AR-based training. Rockwell and other industrial training vendors can offer services that use digital twin and CAD data of equipment, products and processes to create training experiences for these extended reality technologies. “It helps train employees, but it also helps troubleshoot any other issues in the equipment before it gets shipped,” says Sarver. So, there’s a virtual commissioning aspect and value to this AR and VR based training that the customer achieves. Training is one of the biggest use cases for AR and VR in manufacturing.”
Barriers to technology adoption and technology paralysis
Manufacturers in the automotive industry are adopting new technologies rapidly, but not without some friction. 48% of businesses report a lack of skills to manage smart manufacturing initiatives as the biggest barrier to adoption, while 46% report employee resistance to new technologies as the biggest barrier. How can automotive manufacturers overcome these barriers?
Sarver says automotive manufacturers should be more open to partnership. “Historically, the larger automotive companies are inwardly focused. For all the talk about partnering and bringing in and allowing partners to come in to really do part of their work, to be part of their workforce, to be part of their organization, it’s not there,” said Sarver.
By being more open to partnership with technology developers like Rockwell and many others, Sarver says automakers can bring in the expertise needed to open the discussion on the best tools to enable improvements. Automakers have strict IP protections, but NDAs or other protection policies are well accepted by these types of vendors.
“One company can’t do everything,” explained Sarver. “So it’s the ecosystem that we set up as well being able to compare technologies, demonstrate one versus the other, it eliminates some of this paralysis that exists out there in deciding what to do,” said Sarver. “It’s a challenge for them to decide because they don’t have the experience in all the newest technology. They have experience using it, but they don’t understand how to develop and how to deploy, which is a key area, and that’s what the vendors do. So it takes that development and deployment experience mashed up with that user together to eliminate some of these issues and concerns.”
In the survey, 46% of respondents reported employee resistance as a barrier to technology adoption. According to Sarver, it’s important to remember that this includes not only base level workers such as machine operators, but also management and IT personnel.
One major factor in employee resistance is the fear that technology will eliminate jobs. A key point here is technology such as automation doesn’t eliminate jobs, it eliminates tasks–typically dull, dirty and dangerous tasks. In many cases, personnel in these roles are upskilled for other tasks, such as robot programming or maintenance, rather than laid off. If it were true that automation eliminated jobs completely, manufacturing wouldn’t be facing the workforce challenges it is today.
“The way to get people engaged and buy-in is to get them involved upfront,” said Sarver. “One of the things that we find is we need to be cross-functional, because it’s not just a silo anymore, it’s not just quality, it’s not just operations, it’s not just maintenance. These things have to work together. So you have to build a cross-functional team.”
Next, said Sarver, these cross-functional teams can generate buy-in by understanding the specific tasks eliminated by the technology and how they can be upskilled into more technical roles and moved into other areas. This transparency builds trust with employees. “The companies that have been successful, they’ve reorganized their teams to be more cross-functional, to be able to have a team of people and a quality representative, a maintenance representative, an IT representative, so they all work together to go solve this bigger problem that crosses these barriers—that’s how you have to do it.”
Challenge 5 – External factors
In 2023, 54% of auto manufacturers expressed concerns about raw material shortages, while inflation (47%) remains a key issue. What strategies can manufacturers employ to help reduce the potential impact of these external challenges?
On the global scale, government efforts to nearshore and reshore manufacturing is one significant way to help manufacturers tackle these issues. But within the four walls of a factory, Sarver highlighted agile manufacturing as an answer.
“When we talk about material shortages, we talk about scheduling and resource planning. So when you get into resource planning, you’ve got to be able to take those inputs and changes. It could be a machine down on the plant floor, it could be a quality supplier issue. It could be a ship stuck off port. It could be any of these things. So you’ve got to be able to make that adjustment on the fly,” explained Sarver. “Historically production planning has been manual. Even though they’ve tried to do this with ERP systems with some automation, there’s still a manual function to it. Why? Because you have this disconnection off the plant floor to those systems, right? Number one. So one of the things we do is we connect the plant floor directly into those systems.”
By automating the connections and linking inputs from suppliers into these systems as well, Rockwell uses heuristic models together with an optimization engine to effectively schedule manpower, plants and production down to the machine operator level.
Staying Competitive
The State of Smart Manufacturing report highlighted that while today’s automotive manufacturers see technology as an opportunity to reap benefits and stay competitive, it can be challenging to learn and move fast enough to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change. By bringing in experts from vendors like Rockwell, savvy manufacturers can gain the expertise needed to not only make smart investments in the right technology, but also the correct business moves to ensure that people and policies move in line with technology to ensure their business navigates these obstacles effectively.
