We’ve all heard the saying “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” At Rosler Metal Finishing, we often view automation as the solution—or fix, if you will—for mass finishing and shot blasting processes in need of added efficiency.

Previous posts in our Automation Blog Series focused on how robots improve finishing processes and why automation is beneficial to your business. We now turn our focus to an organization’s potential motivation for considering automation with the question, “What problems do you want to solve?”

Both mass finishing and shot blasting are specialized processes that require a lot of practical consideration. Automating these processes can deliver great benefits to a manufacturer when properly targeted to a prescribed need, but, if the engineers developing the machine don’t understand your challenges, the solution is likely to miss its mark.

Automation is changing the way mass finishing and shot blasting processes are delivered. In this seven-part blog series, Rosler Metal Finishing will explain what has given rise to automation trends, the human factors of these manufacturing upgrades, and how such automated processes deliver benefits to your business.

Those of us of a certain age remember a portrayal of robotics that, in hindsight, was rather quaint: human-looking automated machines would be crisscrossing our landscape, delivering us food and wardrobe, pumping our gas, collecting our garbage, or – in a more macabre rendering – leading a rise of the machines that would eliminate the human race.

In reality, Rosie the Robot and the Terminator have not ruled the world, as predicted by Hollywood. Today, faceless, automated machines, arms, and processors are streamlining the way in which products and services are delivered.

In fact, a World Economic Forum article found that the 2020s will be the “age of automation,” with manual jobs making up only 35 percent of the manufacturing labor force by the end of this decade (a drop from 48 percent, as measured in 2016).