Over one hundred years ago in Victorian England, the Industrial Revolution ushered in a new age of large-scale industrial production. This meant many of the traditional workhouses that were filled with labor gave way to factories filled with machines and people to run them. Even today new modern machinery used in manufacturing is using fewer people than it did 20 years ago. In fact it is predicted that by 2025 another 24% of laborers will find themselves looking for alternate employment.
While this may sound like an awful omen for workers and the economy, these new machines are more complex. Like the machines that preceded them, they will create room for wage increases for those employees that remain and help to further improve the standard of living in the country.
Further, these machines have allowed plants to produce more product at a lower cost, and higher quality. Water jet cutters can cut hard surfaces and substances very smoothly, while perfectly meeting the specifications spelled out in the manufacturing blueprints. No matter how experienced the worker, they could never match this quality.
Here are four reasons every manufacturing company needs to modernize their equipment.
1. Quality
The ability of modern machinery to produce a high quality job is unparalleled. While individual employees can do things to a high level of quality and precision, they can never match the predictability of the machine. While they might sometimes be able to hit the spec with the same 99.99% precision of the machine, they will more often than not miss the mark. So from a quality standpoint the machines win every time.
2. Reliability
Unlike employees, machines never call in sick. They do on occasion have mechanical faults, but these can generally be fixed, and repaired – especially on newer machines – within the course of a day or even a few hours. The reality is that employees simply cannot match the machine reliability statistics, as the average employee is legitimately sick 10 days in every year. For an employer this creates a lot of unpredictability.
3. Cost of Labor
Ultimately a machine costs less than an employee in the long run. Other than the cost of purchase, and any ongoing maintenance, machines do not need to get paid, rest, or to work set hours. They can literally be run non-stop. In the case of cutting machines, where a plant may have required 5 people to do the cutting for each shift manually, the machines might allow 1 person to operate the machine cutter for each shift, leading to a significant reduction in the number of workers.
4. Ease of Training
Many of these machines work through a graphical user interface. This means much of their operation is self-explanatory. Generally it takes under a day to train an employee to operate the machinery. Save time and focus on productivity. Invest in some of the best machines in your industry and produce a lot more to serve your audience. Your growth depends on it.