HOW POSSIBLE AND DESIRABLE IS THE REPLACEMENT OF HUMANS BY MACHINES?
The elimination of physical effort as a source of energy in the production process has already been underway for several decades. Factories without workers on the packaging and palletising lines and driverless forklift trucks are no longer a rare phenomenon but an irreversible trend. Driven by economic imperatives – productivity gains, lower production costs, simplification of work organisation, refocusing on the company’s core businesses – this phenomenon is set to accelerate even further in the wake of the health crisis.
The faster a company moves towards automating menial tasks, the more likely it is to maintain the same level of employment. In fact, replacing people with machines to carry out non-productive ancillary tasks is a factor that accelerates growth and encourages the recruitment or transfer of staff to jobs related to the company’s core business.
By reducing production costs and concentrating labour management on high added-value production tasks, substantial savings are made, lowering production costs and making the company more competitive and therefore more attractive in the marketplace.However, in this new organisation, it is no longer possible to leave the smallest of tasks to chance, as the robot and tool are largely devoid of any concept of initiative.
For example, the replenishment of a consumables shop has to be calculated and planned, and palletising patterns designed and programmed. Finally, incidents linked, for example, to products falling to the floor and not being properly stabilised, can lead to total disorganisation of the production line and a halt in production.
Find out how a leading Scandinavian manufacturer of food ingredients managed to fully automate the end of its production line.
