Industrial Automation: A Viable Solution for Labor Shortages

The labor shortage crisis is real and widespread, and it’s not going away any time soon. The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) recently cited Deloitte Insight’s prediction that 2.1 million U.S. manufacturing jobs will be vacant in 2030. A3 went on to explain that labor shortage is global and that the manufacturing giant, China, is also facing a crisis.

The causes for this labor shortage crisis are numerous: aging workforces, pandemic-induced early retirements, and large shifts in worker job expectations (availability of remote work, higher wages to meet rising costs of living, etc.), all factor in. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) indicates that the global labor force participation rate has been declining for the past three decades, and the trend is continuing.

Industrial Automation Can Help Mitigate Increasing Labor Shortages

As the American workforce shrinks and gravitates away from manufacturing jobs, industrial automation can provide much-needed alternatives for jobs that are unwanted or unfillable. But just as manufacturing jobs can be as unique as the products that are manufactured, industrial automation often requires innovative, custom solutions to achieve maximum throughput, flexible scalability, and optimized return-on-investment.

Wes-Tech Delivers High-Value Alternatives in the Face of Labor Shortages

Wes-Tech’s innovative automation solutions have been helping manufacturers optimize productivity and profitability for nearly half a century.

Maximizing Productivity

Both in terms of speed and process quality, our automation experts work with manufacturers to drive productivity by reviewing internal workflows, assessing metrics and inefficiencies, and reducing waste—both materials and time—to deliver optimized solutions for their unique applications.

Ensuring Consistency

Automated systems greatly improve upon human consistency issues in production, enhancing the quality of the final product. When design for automated assembly (DFAA) is employed, the entire manufacturing process—from the first process to the final inspection—can be optimized around throughput efficiency and quality to deliver increased ROI for capital investments.

Improving Safety

By taking over repetitive and physically demanding tasks, robots help prevent ergonomic and musculoskeletal injuries among workers. Automation also reduces the need for workers to perform high-risk tasks, ultimately lowering the overall injury rate and promoting a safer workplace. Robotic systems are equipped with advanced sensors and safety features that enable them to detect and respond to obstacles or unexpected events, minimizing the risk of accidents. Wes-Tech incorporates leading-edge safety features into our designs to ensure our solutions provide solid safety results.

If you are sensing that labor shortages are a threat to your business, don’t hesitate to contact us to see where and how automation can supplement your labor needs.

Team Wes-Tech