Bob Tita of The Wall Street Journal reports that orders for robots have fallen as labor shortages ease and production volumes slide; ‘it doesn’t justify the expenditures to automate it.’ Tita writes:
Robots are getting less work at U.S. factories.
Manufacturers are cutting back on purchases of automation equipment, executives said, as business slows on production lines and shop floors. More human workers are lining up for work again, too.
Orders for factory robots in North America plunged by nearly one-third last year from 2022’s record volume, according to the Association for Advancing Automation, a trade group for the robotics industry. Orders slipped further over the first six months of this year. […]
In Cleveland, manufacturing company Jergens produces attachments that enable robot arms to pick up and hold parts in a factory. Company President Jack Schron said that while sales are growing this year in aerospace and defense, business is flat in its other markets.
For factory managers who have struggled to find workers willing to do boring, repetitive or physically taxing jobs, robots present a dream solution—not needing breaks and being immune to injuries and suddenly quitting.
But Schron said some companies that bought robots during the pandemic-driven labor crunch underestimated the maintenance and programming skill needed to deploy them to more complicated tasks.[…]
Marsic said he expects robotics demand to rebound as interest rates come down, making them cheaper for manufacturers. “With robots, companies are in a holding pattern,” he said. […]
Instead, his employees are doing much of the work manually because orders for EV parts this year are running about at quarter of the annual volume originally forecast when the company received the contracts.
“It doesn’t justify the expenditures to automate it,” Adler said.
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