‘No one wants to unbox parts.’ How ‘cobots’ are changing the local work landscape
The robots aren’t coming. They’re already here.
Tool Gauge is the latest Tacoma employer to put collaborative robots, or “cobots,” to use at their plastic and metal assembly site, 4315 S. Adams St.
The company for now has two of the bots produced by Universal Robots, at a cost of about $35,000 each. One works in the metals division, the other in plastics.
Jim Lee is Tool Gauge general manager and a board member of the Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance. Lee told The News Tribune the cobots have helped improve production and working conditions by taking on jobs the plant has not been able to hire out.
“The work these robots do isn’t the kind anyone wants to do,” he said. “These jobs are repetitive, tedious, very precise application of small parts assembly, offloading and unboxing.”
Tool Gauge has expanded in the past few years, now with a labor force of 180 and a new state-of-the-art manufacturing site set to open later this spring.
“We can see our factory in a few years with more automation with skilled workers, but as we grow we’re focusing on making it a smart factory to remain globally competitive,” Lee said.
While staying competitive is the priority, the county’s labor force as a whole remains vulnerable as the use of automation grows beyond cobots.
A 2018 study estimated roughly half the labor force in Pierce County performed jobs that rated at a high probability of becoming automated in the near future, including retail, food prep, truck driving and general lower-skill labor.
Those sentiments were echoed in a September 2019 report from WorkForce Central, which also pointed to some potential positive outcomes.
“Firefighters, for example, are now using drones to spot and assess fires earlier and leveraging IOT (internet-of-things) devices for safety monitoring in the line of work (UW Tacoma),” the WorkForce Central report stated. “Robotic-assisted surgeries are now considered a common practice, yielding improved precision across a growing portfolio of procedures (MultiCare).”
That report still warned that Pierce County was at a higher risk of losing jobs to automation than either King or Thurston counties.
County workforce vulnerable to automation
Tool Gauge’s automation drive is becoming a familiar one in Pierce County, as more “smart” sites go into operation.
Back in 2017, when NewCold announced its automated site for Tacoma, it was among the first in a handful of automated cold storage sites in the state.
Amazon also has been on the vanguard of using robots in its distribution centers, including its DuPont warehouse.
Walmart has turned to bots to keep its store inventories up to date.
“Bossa Nova autonomous shelf scanners use automation to scan shelves and help identify where in-stock levels are low, prices are wrong, or labels are missing,” Tiffany Wilson, the retailer’s director of communications, told The News Tribune in January.
“In addition, the scanners provide a real-time view of inventory in the store — information used to direct associates to the areas of the store that need the most attention.”
The technology is now in 350 Walmart store nationwide.
“We plan to expand by 650 to reach 1,000 locations by end of FY21,” Wilson said.
Walmart emphasizes it has not used the bots to replace humans but rather to focus on the work that is “repeatable, predictable and manual.”
The tech “frees up time for our associates to focus on what they tell us are the most important and exciting parts of working at Walmart —serving customers and selling merchandise,” the retailer wrote in a 2017 blog entry about its bots.
As Walmart expands its tech inventory management, it’s also focused on educating its workforce through a debt-free college degree program and tech apprenticeships.
Other retailers haven’t been as quick to adopt robotic inventory staffing. Fred Meyer and QFC, for example, have only gone as far as self-checkout, according to a representative for the local retailers.
Universal Robots also has seen its cobots implemented at Toolcraft, a small machine shop in Monroe, Washington, which is “now able to handle an increase in orders by adding cobots on third shift,” according to Joe Campbell, senior manager of applications development at Universal Robots
Beyond that, “We don’t report specific installed base numbers, but we have dozens of customers in the state of Washington, and are adding more every month,” Campbell told The News Tribune.
“Nobody wants to run on third shift around here. When you put an ad out, you’re not getting very many responses,” says Steve Wittenberg, director of operations at Toolcraft in Universal Robot’s case study report about the project.
According to that report, Toolcraft says it has plans to install one new cobot a year.
Bot use and the future
The WorkForce Central report noted despite the county’s vulnerability, “With eight colleges and universities, the region is equipped with the infrastructure to train and upskill workers to meet almost any emerging labor need.”
Lee noted the work the two cobots at Tool Gauge have taken on was not work the company previously had been able to find workers to accomplish at a steady pace. He said workers tied to those jobs generally left after a short time, costing the company money in hiring and recruiting, only to have to repeat the cycle over and over.
Lee said that the bots also are saving the workers from repetitive stress injuries and allowing employees to do more varied, skilled work.
“This saves a full-time journeyman machinist from doing it, who frankly doesn’t want to do this work,” he said. “No one wants to unbox parts.”
One part the company works on calls for 20 rivets.
“You can imagine riveting over and over. We think we can get a riveted attachment very efficient, then you won’t have people there getting carpal tunnel,” Lee said. “There’s a number of other applications that fall in that category. You can put attachments on the end, and there’s almost unlimited potential.
“Five years ago, if we’d talked about this, people would have thought we were crazy.”
Lee said the company at first was skeptical workers would be receptive to the cobots, but the reaction was the opposite.
“For us it was a no-brainer after seeing how they were received, and we think dozens more could be in our future,” he said.
For all his enthusiasm, Lee cautioned that it’s not a swift changeover scenario.
“It’s not quite as simple to set up as we initially thought,” he said. “It takes time.”
What’s next?
Lee says the company is considering mobile industrial robots to move larger items instead of using forklifts, another source of potential workplace injuries.
“Those are affordable now,” he said. “We had one out for a demonstration, and it was breathtakingly efficient.
“It’s like a big Roomba. They map the facility and don’t get distracted.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article misattributed quotes from Joe Campbell, senior manager of applications development at Universal Robots.
This story was originally published February 20, 2020 at 5:20 AM.
