Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Although manufacturing’s share of employment in the U.S. has dropped from 33% in 1947 to under 8% in 2019, it is currently the manufacturers who are desperately searching for workers and not the other way around. In fact, according to a study performed by the Workforce Institute at UKG, 54% of U.S. manufacturing firms reported extreme difficulty in hiring and...
Read MoreTuesday, September 7, 2021
When questioning whether or not automation is a necessity, the easiest answer is to provide clear examples of how it is the most useful and essential tool. In today’s world, many manufacturers still depend heavily on the working hands of people, even if these tasks may be dangerous or extremely repetitive. Most of these tasks are difficult to hire because...
Read MoreWednesday, September 1, 2021
First Fully Customized Robotics-as-a-Service Offering Lets Manufacturers ‘Hire’ Popular Robots at Low Hourly Rate By handling every aspect of financing and deployment, Formic empowers manufacturers to save money from day one and boost production. CHICAGO, IL — August 24, 2021-- Robotics-as-a-service company Formic Technologies launched today with a simple value proposition: hire fully customized robots from top vendors at a...
Read MoreThursday, August 26, 2021
LIVERMORE, Calif., Aug 26 (Reuters) - Silicon Valley has a new pitch to persuade small companies to automate: rent-a-robot. Better technology and the need to pay higher wages to humans have produced a surge in sales of robots to big companies all across America. But few of these automatons are making it into smaller factories, which are wary of big...
Read MoreThursday, August 5, 2021
Automation is practically a requirement for any manufacturing business that expects to compete today. An established company that wants to get automation typically has to pay with cash, take out a loan (e.g. from a bank), or get specific equipment financing to purchase the equipment. This CAPEX equipment purchase uses money that the business could otherwise have used to grow. ...
Read MoreFriday, July 23, 2021
The pervasive feeling in the manufacturing space is, when you need something automated, you need to go out and buy a robot. However, before putting up a huge amount of capital on a new system, manufacturers need to ask themselves: Do I have the right system for the job? Am I getting this system at the best possible price? Do...
Read MoreTuesday, June 22, 2021
If automation was as simple as getting a loan, buying the system, and making more money, every business in the country would be automated. Unfortunately, there are some large roadblocks standing between small businesses and complete optimization of their production lines. Too Many Options The “too many options” paralysis applies to not only the equipment specifications (which vendor to use...
Read MoreFriday, June 11, 2021
On Tuesday, the Senate passed the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, a bipartisan bill that aims to spend $250 billion on scientific research and development to bolster competitiveness against China. It has not yet passed the House. The bipartisan support for this bill reflects the sense of urgency policymakers feel with regards countering the substantial investments China has made into...
Read MoreThursday, May 27, 2021
This Q&A with Misa and I was originally featured on RoboticsTomorrow.com, you can read the original article here. What is Formic, and who are the co-founders? Formic is a robotics-as-a-service company that is fundamentally changing the way industrial robotics are scoped and deployed. We handle all of the logistics of an automation deployment, from scoping and customization to installation and maintenance....
Read MoreTuesday, May 11, 2021
Robotic automation has the potential to produce incredible returns for facilities who choose to deploy, but it can also be quite the resource drain when applications do not work out as planned. Sometimes these issues are easily fixed with basic troubleshooting or reprogramming, other times this downtime can wreak havoc on production processes and cause critical problems for manufacturers. Issues...
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