8 APRIL 2024OPINIONFor many businesses, 2023 has been a tough year, and those in the manufacturing industry have been afforded no exception. Inflation has continued to drive up the prices of commodities and purchased components. At the same time, higher interest rates have started to temper customer demand and increased financial pressure for businesses operating on credit.The solution for many is to offshore more manufacturing to countries with lower labor rates, but is this the only solution?Indeed, there are many reasons to keep manufacturing operations local, perhaps none greater than minimizing shipping costs, as well as the associated environmental footprint.The key to avoiding the need for offshore manufacturing involves desensitizing manufacturing operations from labor costs. The rapid development of automation is helping with this.Until recently, automation has been tainted by long setup times, frequent adjustment to environmental conditions, and high costs to introduce and maintain.For example, a simple MIG welding operation would have taken a highly bespoke control system to maintain tight control over the gap between the welding electrode and the substrate to be welded.Furthermore, to ensure adequate quality, the welding operation may have necessitated a vision system, and often, that vision system would have been susceptible to periodic failure or frequent false negatives when consistent lighting conditions could not be maintained.Fast forward to today, where we have reduced the cost of processing power, advanced in the field of artificial intelligence, and developed lower-cost cameras with higher resolution and faster frame rates. These advancements, along with many more, have made automation more accessible to manufacturing businesses of all sizes.When coupled with an increasingly skilled labor force, these technology leaps are drastically reducing automation MANUFACTURING IN THE AGE OF AUTOMATION AND SIMULATIONBy Matt Higgins, Sr. Manager, Manufacturing Engineering, Tesla [NASDAQ: TSLA]Matt Higgins
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