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$400 million 1 million square feet more than 2,000 jobs Given how much automation is used in modern factory, I'm surprised it'll create that many jobs. Given

by aynyc 5y ago

$400 million 1 million square feet more than 2,000 jobs Given how much automation is used in modern factory, I'm surprised it'll create that many jobs. Given the products are fairly consistent, wouldn't the production lines be robots?

jcrawfordor 5y ago
Extensive production automation is really expensive. You'd probably be surprised how much electronics and consumer goods manufacturing is still largely manual. In particular, high automation gets you into pretty extreme retooling costs whenever you change your designs.
- baybal2 5y ago
  If feel you know what you are saying. People saying automation will save American manufacturing have zero experience with real manufacturing.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    There has been a large amount of automation that most people don't think of much anymore . Factories that used to employ thousands in the 1950s now only have hundreds. Assembly might be manual, but cutting is all automated. The factory I work in got rid of 200 employees just by getting Lazar cutters for sheet steel. And many other machines.
underwater 5y ago
They usually fudge the numbers for number of jobs badly. For example you might find that construction requires 1,500 different people for varying lengths of time, and the factory employs 500 people on an ongoing basis.
- aynyc 5y ago
  That’s more inline from what I’ve read but is that true in general?
jjk166 5y ago
I mean, it's still just 1 person every 500 sq ft. That's a pretty sparsely populated factory. And nowadays automation rarely reduces the number of employees substantially. The days of a worker doing one very simple task day in and day out are long gone. Most automated manufacturing lines are designed with every step having an associated operator who can load material in and out (which is a very difficult task to automate generally), which also keeps a person conveniently located for handling errors, cleaning, light maintenance, handling edge cases, assisting people at neighboring workstations, etc. In fact, automation actually often requires more labor as robots tend to be slower than human workers and prone to various errors which humans would simply deal with. Their advantage though is in automation's consistency, which allows for much more efficient supply chain management. While some automated systems can be made to outperform human operators, this is usually prohibitively expensive.

by aynyc 5y ago

jcrawfordor 5y ago

Extensive production automation is really expensive. You'd probably be surprised how much electronics and consumer goods manufacturing is still largely manual. In particular, high automation gets you into pretty extreme retooling costs whenever you change your designs.

baybal2 5y ago
If feel you know what you are saying. People saying automation will save American manufacturing have zero experience with real manufacturing.
- bluGill 5y ago
  There has been a large amount of automation that most people don't think of much anymore . Factories that used to employ thousands in the 1950s now only have hundreds. Assembly might be manual, but cutting is all automated. The factory I work in got rid of 200 employees just by getting Lazar cutters for sheet steel. And many other machines.

underwater 5y ago

They usually fudge the numbers for number of jobs badly. For example you might find that construction requires 1,500 different people for varying lengths of time, and the factory employs 500 people on an ongoing basis.

aynyc 5y ago
That’s more inline from what I’ve read but is that true in general?

jjk166 5y ago

I mean, it's still just 1 person every 500 sq ft. That's a pretty sparsely populated factory. And nowadays automation rarely reduces the number of employees substantially. The days of a worker doing one very simple task day in and day out are long gone. Most automated manufacturing lines are designed with every step having an associated operator who can load material in and out (which is a very difficult task to automate generally), which also keeps a person conveniently located for handling errors, cleaning, light maintenance, handling edge cases, assisting people at neighboring workstations, etc. In fact, automation actually often requires more labor as robots tend to be slower than human workers and prone to various errors which humans would simply deal with. Their advantage though is in automation's consistency, which allows for much more efficient supply chain management. While some automated systems can be made to outperform human operators, this is usually prohibitively expensive.