Podcast: Making automation accessible to small- and medium-sized manufacturers

And that basically leads the cost of automation to double. You have to pay, obviously, for all the hardware and the technology from the traditional player. Plus, you have to pay for the engineering firm that might assist you through that journey. So what we're trying to do at Vention is to provide tools where manufacturing practitioners can actually do it by themselves. And that's really the core of do-it-yourself automation.

For do-it-yourself automation to be successful, there's a couple of things that need to be true. One is, we tend to favor an approach where components are plug and play, right? There's no wiring, terminal wires, terminal blocks, enclosures. All of those things are removed. They're constructed to pass. Where somebody who's a manufacturing professional, who has process knowledge but might not be a roboticist or control expert can figure it out by themselves. And as soon as this is true, we see those teams then start to, perhaps, take a first entry-level use case and then buy themselves what I call a platform. A place where the design aspect, the programming aspect, the deployment assistance, and the operational machine have been united by a digital workflow that makes the experience very, very simple. And as those businesses start with do-it-yourself, information grows. What we tend to see is they form advanced manufacturing teams. Initially, it might be a single person, but over time, is going to grow, and those teams will be responsible for driving the automation agenda internally for one or multiple plants. And that's really the trend we've been witnessing since 2017. Before then, everything was driven, perhaps, through external help, and we see more and more of those small and medium manufacturers, in order to reduce costs and make automation profitable for them, start to decide to do those projects by themselves.

Like this episode? Listen to "Manufacturers are abandoning analog and embracing digitalization to stay competitive and secure"

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.

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