For our newest blog article, we spoke with Rubén Ocampo Villa, Senior Account Coordinator of GPSCOM Mexico, about his view on the market. Rubén is an expert in PR and connecting companies and publications to discuss market trends.
One of the many side effects of the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic is a perceptible recognition within companies of all sizes of the value of their people.
Not that this was taken for granted before, but there is no doubt that during the pandemic more credence was given to employee health and wellness, and terms like flexible working and work-life balance began to enter to the national lexicon. In addition to this, many employees around the world have begun testing a four-day work week to transform workers' lives and improve employee well-being.
A future for people
Much of the attention from the four-day-a-week trials has been on transforming the lives of office workers. However, this new normal could also apply to industries like manufacturing, where a labor gap exists, and the industry is simultaneously trying to improve productivity and correct supply chain problems.
In some countries such as England, and within the manufacturing sector in particular, the Manufacturing Technology Center (MTC) in Coventry has offered a four-day week to 820 of its technical staff workers after a two-year trial of 'Week of fully flexible working' where 50% of employees reported increased productivity. The new work option will see staff work fewer, but longer shifts, to cover the same number of hours in a four-day week as five.
Given this scenario, we can ask ourselves how autonomous mobile robots, or AMRs, can in many countries, such as Mexico, help make the four-day week a reality for manufacturing professionals by increasing productivity levels, which will facilitate the reduction of hours and, in turn, will improve job satisfaction.
How can mobile autonomous robots make a four-day workweek a reality?
The key is to automate critical tasks. Often when workers have been operating machines for a period of days, weeks, months, and years, it is unlikely that automation was ever properly considered as a method of improving the efficiency of that process; a case where the task is always done in a certain way (even if it's simple), so why is there a need to change?
Now is the opportunity to use robots in tasks that have never been automated before. We're talking about jobs: dangerous, repetitive, and boring, and its amazing how many tedious tasks people still do. A four-day workweek, achieved through collaborative automation, can ensure that workers no longer need to spend time on menial factory tasks.
By working with mobile autonomous robots, employees can focus their time on more fulfilling roles and reduce the time they spend at work, improving overall well-being. This includes getting rid of the night shift, known to have an adverse effect on workers' health.
If companies can change the way they operate through the use of automation, the tasks can be condensed into four days. Mobile autonomous robots give you the opportunity to work more efficiently in the manufacturing process and could potentially produce more in four days, eliminating the need to work a fifth.
How to close the labor gap, try to improve productivity and solve supply chain problems?
It is important to highlight the main dilemma currently facing manufacturing in Mexico and many Latin American countries: relocation or reshoring. This is a constant trend in the sector, as companies seek to strengthen the resilience of their supply chains; bring production and component sourcing closer to home.
However, various economic factors have made free access to labor more difficult. So even though the sector is busy, there is often a shortage of people to do the jobs. Far from taking jobs away from humans, automation can improve the quality of manufacturing roles, attracting a whole new generation of talent.
The industry is currently facing an aging workforce, so attracting young people with exciting career prospects and a healthy work-life balance will help address the problem, especially if manufacturers can offer longer working weeks. four days in the future. A question that is always being asked in all kinds of industries is whether robots are going to take our jobs away. The fact is that robots take over tasks, they don't take jobs.
Human skill and manpower is the most important asset for any manufacturing business. If companies want to recruit people, retain them, and have a sustainable future, they must truly value the people they have. Those monotonous and repetitive jobs discussed above are ideal for automation that can take on tasks that people don't want to do. And in truth, due to labor shortages, these are tasks that employers don't want their workers to do either. Instead of doing boring, repetitive, and boring tasks, bringing in mobile autonomous robots allows these people to focus on areas where they can add real value. And that fills the job void.
This means that they would be adding the value of human skill to the labor gap while removing the tedious jobs of human operation. There are a lot of tasks in Latin America that have not yet been automated; We haven't even scratched the surface yet.
Why do Mexico and Latin America seem to be left behind?
Mexico has always been a labor-intensive economy. Before the pandemic, tasks in factories were typically carried out by imported labor from other countries, rather than being incorporated into a long-term plan for automation rollout. However, we are now forced to take the automation route, as that large pool of labor is no longer available.
Latin America has not traditionally invested in machinery to the same extent as other nations such as the United States or Europe. Automation levels are high in Denmark, for example. The country's unions claim that if a job can be automated with a robot, then it should be, to improve the health and well-being of employees in that factory.
We need to get into that mindset, because if we create a sustainable manufacturing base, we can become a powerful and productive nation; that's one of the things we need to change. And change is happening. We've been through a huge transformation in the last two years, but coming out of the pandemic, manufacturers now have a clear vision of what they need to do.
