EVOLVE Business and Professional Magazine August 2019 | Page 11

O
nce dull, hot and noisy, factories in Volusia County are
hipper today. Automation, collaborative robots and
3D printers are making operations faster, leaner and
responsive to change, a big help for lowering costs, increasing
productivity, adapting quickly to consumer demand and dealing
with a labor shortage.
In factories around Volusia County, a once noisy contrast to the
playful beaches, it’s getting quieter on more of the assembly lines.
Workers tap on computer keyboards to design parts for airplanes,
cars and rockets, and 3D printers knock them out, almost silently.
This is an emerging technology known as additive
manufacturing, or printing layer upon layer of metals, plastics and
other materials to make an object.
3D Material Technologies (3DMT) specializes in this at its
Daytona Beach plant for manufacturing components for the
aerospace, defense, industrial and medical industries. In March,
Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, a California-based maker of rocket
engines and propulsion systems, acquired the company to expand
its additive manufacturing capacity.
Ashley Nichols, director of additive manufacturing at
3DMT, describes 3D printing as a convergence of traditional
manufacturing processes such as brazing, stamping, welding and
assembly, adding that this improves the performance and reliability
of its products.
3DMT Laser
“By printing things, we’re able to add in features that we
were not able to with conventional technology. We can combine
parts so that we get the reliability from integration and reduce the
processing steps,” he said. “If you reduce the number of parts, you
are reducing the number of people in the supply chain so you can
also reduce the lead time and the overall cost of the components.”
Before, manufacturers would acquire or build the specific
tooling machines to make components, a process that could add up
to a year to the lead time, or the total time it takes to manufacture
an item.
“With additive manufacturing, you are able to skip that
investment step as well as the lead time to create that part,”
Nichols said.
This makes it cheaper and quicker to get products to market,
improving a manufacturer’s competitiveness in pricing
and delivery.
COLLABORATIVE ROBOTS
In Volusia, as in much of America, the shift to additive and
other advanced manufacturing technologies started a few years
Collaborative robot technology
ago. While some manufacturers are behind, others are so advanced
that their plants look futuristic, said Jayne C. Fifer, president and
CEO of VMA, a manufacturers’ association in the county.
Take Pall Corporation. It recently added its first collaborative
robot to its filter production line in DeLand. Simple to program,
the robot can be set up in seconds and easily operated. It can
even hand parts to people without any safety concerns, said Ryan
Theodore, the manufacturing technology manager at the plant.
The robot reduces costs. Instead of employing two workers at
a combined 80 hours per week, the robot requires only 10 hours a
week in oversight, he said.
That is a key with automation, “to get the maximum output
from it with as little operator interaction as possible,” Theodore
said. “Ideally, you’d load your raw materials and get a finished
product out the other end. That is basically all you want the
operator to be doing.”
The robot, he said, is doing the repetitive, menial tasks that are
hard to fill. This makes it vital at a time when low unemployment
makes it “very hard to find workers who are trained or stay on
the job,” he added. “Incorporating robots helps eliminate the
need for new workers. We can keep our more skilled workforce
and not have to hire on so many new people when we implement
collaborative robots. Instead of hiring somebody off the street who
doesn’t know how to do this job, we can incorporate a robot
and move whoever was in that position to something
more meaningful.”
At the same time, this improves efficiency and productivity.
“The robot doesn’t go to lunch, it doesn’t call in sick,” he said.
“When you are trying to plan your production schedule, you
don’t have to worry about whether you have the right people to
do it. You always have this robot and you know that it is going to
perform the task.”
This helps in two ways. First, it lowers costs, helping to make
it possible to attract skilled labor with higher wages. Second,
the robot makes the factory a cooler place to work “by showing
that we’re wanting to move into the future and keep up with the
manufacturing trends,” Theodore said.
TIGHT LABOR MARKET
The push to technologize is a response to multiple factors. For
one, a decline in prices has made technology more affordable,
allowing smaller factories to modernize. But as important, it’s
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