IN WELDINGThe Growing Skills Gap in WeldingAnd How Automation Can Help Bridge it

AUTOMATION

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The Growing Skills Gap in WeldingAnd How Automation Can Help Bridge it

he U.S. passed a significant milestone in the spring of 2018: For the first time ever, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

(BLS) reported more job openings than people available to fill them. While exceptionally low unemployment might seem like a boon to the country, the emerging labor gap signals financial headwinds for many companies. Those within the manufacturing sector – which has outpaced the growth of other economic sectors – are feeling the pain from this labor gap most acutely.

Research from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) helps quantify the pressure that executives are feeling. SME reports 89 percent of manufacturers are having difficulty finding skilled workers while, in NAM’s most recent Outlook Survey, manufacturing executives listed “finding skilled workers” among their top challenges today. And the shortages aren’t just limited to skilled positions, such as welding, but also to line positions such as assembly, machine tending, and packaging.

The situation does not appear ready to improve anytime soon. The most recent skills gap study from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute — NAM’s social-impact arm — projects that more than half of the 4.6 million manufacturing jobs created over the next decade will go unfilled.

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Who Will Carry the Torch?

Notably, that “more than half” figure aligns with another skills shortage — namely welders who, together with the machinist occupation, represent just over 50 percent of all manufacturing jobs, according to another Deloitte study titled Help wanted: American manufacturing competitiveness and the looming skills gap.

For decades, the occupational numbers for those who wield a torch to weld, cut, solder, and braze has offered a reliable indicator for the

26%

AVERAGE AGE

OVERTIME

70Hrs / Wk

DEMAND

Increase inDemandby 2020

SHORTAGES

291,000

by 2020

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A labor gap not only means lower productivity, it also engenders more overtime. In 2017, the welding occupation earned a median pay with benefits of $62,500. That breaks down to roughly $30 per hour. Yet welders can work up to 70 hours per week, according to professional development groups. For example, welders working in the oil and gas industry often spend 70 or more hours per week on the job, while a tier 1 automotive supplier might only receive two hours of overtime each week.

Consider an average between these two welding operations in the hypothetical context small metal shop. The shop employs five welders, each costing the company $62,500 per year in salary and benefits. These welders also clock 10 hours of overtime per week due to labor shortages at their facility. Across all five welders, overtime amounts to an additional 50 hours per week, or $117,000 in overtime pay from the company. In truth, the labor costs are even higher once bonuses and an additional 10% in hourly wage for mid-range welding experience is added to the scenario.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth underlying the labor gap numbers is that the demand for welders does not equate with availability. There’s no army of unemployed but highly skilled welders waiting to pick up their torches, re-enter the workforce, and alleviate these challenges. After decades of attrition, the average age for those in the profession is 55, and most are likely to retire within 10 years. Comparing this pending wave of retirements

overall health of U.S. manufacturing. When the sector began to constrict in the 1980s, welding was viewed as a profession in decline — and it was at that time. The number of those employed by the occupation dropped from 570,000 in 1988 to below 360,000 by 2012. As manufacturing goes, so goes the welding profession — or so it would seem.

In 2009, as the U.S. manufacturing sector began to recover in step with the national economy, demand for welders began to rise. But manufacturing soon outpaced the larger economy which, by 2012, drove demand for skilled welders higher than any other employment category. According to BLS’s latest numbers, the occupation of welder employed more than 400,000 Americans, and demand for the skill set has not diminished. BLS projects the need for welders is expected to grow another 26 percent by 2020.

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What distinguishes the technologies of Industry 4.0 is that they blur the line between human, computer, and machine. Collaborative robot (cobot) technology is the perfect illustration of modern manufacturing, combining the physical abilities and digital control systems of a robot as part of a solution designed to safely and effectively collaborate with people.

Today’s cobots are both similar to and vastly different from the industrial robots widely used by U.S. corporations since the 1970s. While early robotics improved productivity on a mass scale, it also introduced a few issues. The technology was expensive to purchase and install and required engineering staff to keep it operating. In addition, the necessary safety systems consumed considerable factory floor space.

with the current talent pipeline, the American Welding Society projects that the shortage of welding professionals in the U.S. will reach 291,000 by 2020.

Lastly, beneath this shortage of workers lies the somewhat more nuanced gap in skills. The welding occupation demands a broad range of skills, techniques, and applications that can be taught but not mastered in a two-year vocational school. Even if enrollments in welding schools doubled tomorrow, the skills shortage that took decades to build up will not be trained away in a matter of years.

While all these factors present mounting challenges for manufacturers seeking highly qualified welders for finer skill work, McKinsey & Company finds a silver lining to the looming skills shortage. It reports that 90 percent of the work that welders, cutters, solderers, and brazers perform has the technical potential for automation.

Automation as a Workforce Multiplier

The current skills gap has emerged despite the widespread, decades-long application of industrial robots on the factory floor. While large-scale robotic platforms helped define the last industrial revolution by accelerating repeatable welding tasks on the production line, their operating footprint and complex programming language limited application to certain fixed tasks within the factory.

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welders can be mounted on tabletops, hung from ceilings, or installed into existing welding booths, offering more flexibility than manual welders or traditional fixed robots. Many designs can be deployed 50 percent faster than industrial robots and often impose an installation cost lower than the annual new employee wage.

Cobots also lessen the challenges, time, and requirements associated with programming robots for new welding applications. The flexibility and ease-of-programming of cobot-based welding systems make them especially well-suited for low-volume/high-mix environments, as well as custom or small-template welding processes. But with high accuracy and repeatability, these systems can also handle long runs with consistent quality.

Unlike traditional robots that require engineer-level programming, cobots are designed to make programming simple through human-machine interfaces (HMI) familiar to anyone who has used a smartphone. Welding tasks can be programmed in as little as a half hour by workers who have no previous experience, and programs can be saved and reused, eliminating the expense of trained robot programmers.

With advances in artificial intelligence algorithms, cobots are also capable of learning on the job. In many cases, a worker can reprogram a cobot simply by putting its arm through the desired motions; the cobot remembers the instruction and repeats it

Cobots offer the same benefits as traditional robotics: taking over dirty, dangerous, or repetitive jobs so skilled welders can focus on more value-added processes; improving product quality; and enhancing productivity and yield. In exchange for lower payload capacities compared to traditional robots, cobots offer manufacturers several benefits that traditional robotics cannot.

First and foremost, cobots are designed to work right next to people without a safety fence in-between. Thanks to their unique design, most cobots do not require safety cages or disruptive redesigns of the plant floor. Lightweight cobot

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As Deloitte states in its 2018 Global Human Capital Trends report, many organizations continue to seek ways to transform their business by rethinking work architecture, retraining workers, and leveraging technology to transform business. In addition to cutting costs and streamlining production, their goal is to enhance value for customers. The human–machine pairing that cobots enable is an important step toward delivering this value.

Let Universal Robots introduce you to the new paradigm in safe, flexible, and easy-to-deploy factory automation, and demonstrate how collaborative robots can help you multiply workforce productivity, increase customer value, and beat the shortage of welders.

Contact us at na.marketing@universal-robots.com to identify projects where cobots can deliver value in under 12 months. In most cases, our technology can be implemented and operating within 30 days of submission of your purchase order.

independently, without the need for new code. Beyond greatly reducing the time, effort, and cost associated with retasking a cobot for temporary jobs or burst production during busy seasons, such interfaces and capabilities eliminate the need for workers to possess a formal education in programming or robotics, diminishing the skills gap and learning curve for using cobots considerably.

While industrial robot workcells often require considerable customization, the flexibility of a cobot translates to significantly faster return on investment. By speeding deployment with minimal disruption to a factory layout, and by enabling minimally trained workers to safely program and use the technology to multiply productivity and improve quality, a cobot’s payback is often measured in weeks or months (see Universal Robots case study library for more details.) This fast ROI is not just a function of cobot technology’s lower capital cost versus industrial robots. It is enabled by a cobot’s ability to multiply the value of an enterprise’s human assets, freeing workers to tackle higher productivity processes and acquire new skills for a modern manufacturing age.