Forums » Off-Topic Discussions
Robots as a (Low Cost) Service
-
The Georgia Nut company faced a dilemma common to many manufacturers: it didn’t have enough employees to meet demand for its products. With just over 160 employees, the 77-year-old Illinois company, which specializes in nuts and wholesale confections, was often short staffed by 15 to 20 people per shift. Like many manufacturers, Georgia Nut had for years considered automating. But concerns about the high upfront investment and performance risk kept the company on the sidelines.To get more news about GRS, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
Over and over again I hear this exact same line: ‘We’ve been planning to automate this cell for the last 10 years,’” said Saman Farid, co-founder and CEO of Formic, which began offering fully customized robots as a service (RaaS) in late 2020. “It doesn’t happen because it’s too risky, too expensive, too complicated. Or, they have robots that a charismatic salesman convinced them to buy now sitting in a corner, collecting dust.”
Farid explained that the labor shortage and stalled operations are impacting manufacturers. “Plants are sitting idle 75 percent of the time. No wonder U.S. prices are higher than our global competitors. No wonder we can’t compete with production in China and Vietnam. When we give them an abundant workforce of robots on demand, their capacity goes up instantly. They don’t have to build any new facilities. They become way more competitive at the flick of a switch.”
Of course, adding more robots solves only the labor problem. Traditional leases slash the high upfront investment but not the fear of new technology/performance risk, Farid said.“But these were financial leases, just a way to avoid capitalization and not that different from normal ownership,” said A.K. Schultz, co-founder and CEO of SVT Robotics. The company, which was launched in 2018, makes platforms designed to ease and speed robot integration. “I started to see it tilt about five years ago,” he continued. “Robots as a service is different. There is a more on-demand component. RaaS also is a means by which to deal with uncertainty and seasonality.”
Enter true RaaS, which can solve both the worker shortage and the automation fear factor, with benefits to both manufacturers who use robots and the companies who make and sell robots.
As business uncertainty has accelerated, RaaS has become a more inviting option. “People have very little business certainty year to year,” Schultz said. “The ability to be flexible is quickly trumping the need to optimize capital for five years.”
RaaS is a win for both the company purchasing the service and the robot makers, according to Schultz. “If you’re a business, you don’t have the big upfront cash outlay. You can pay for what you think you need and then add to it. You can have machines during your peak season and you pay for them only when you need them. It’s also a benefit to the robot companies. They’re not always installing brand new robots. They can maintain a fleet of inventory and use them across multiple customers. They can charge a peak season premium, during Christmas and other peak seasons.”
Prasad Akella, founder and chairman of manufacturing-focused video analytics and software-as-a-service company Drishti, based in Mountain View, Calif., credits the robotics group at General Motors as a global leader in working through the details of deploying robotic systems. Akella cited two key takeaways. First, designing the robot in simulation and buying the robot were easy. Second, making the robotic system work as designed on an actual plant floor and achieving a functioning robotic system were much more difficult. In response, the GM robotics team created internal standards for different use cases.