[dtap]

"And modern supply chains were built around that very premise – that hands were needed"

That is quite far from the truth. Having been in many plants, automation is almost everywhere. The pay-back period on automation (Variable Speed Drives, for example) is under a year.

If you watch an updated version of the crayon process (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl1v1m_you-ve-got-crayola-c...), you see how many of those people have been replaced by robots. A fully burdened worker salary (~$70k) can buy you a good deal of robots.

[ChuckMcM]

Ok, so I watched them both, and clearly some of the same machines are still there, it looks like the only guy who lost his job to automation was the guy who took the molded crayons and put them into the labeler. All the other steps were pretty much identical.

Now personally I love manufacturing porn, I don't know why but I can watch an hour or two of 'How its Made' and just spin all these ideas about in my head. And what you see when you watch more than a bit of that show is that there are things that are designed to be built by automation, and things that aren't.

So on the one hand you look at things that aren't made to be automated and you think "Hmm, can I disrupt that market by designing an automated way to build that widget?" or as the OP wrote you might think "Hmm what pieces need to be assembled to make an arbitrary widget?"

One of the things that came up in an earlier thread was that you could go across the street in Shenzen(sp?) and have an arbitrary fastener made. Things take lots of fasteners, and they are essential to manufacturing, but making them requires specific tooling for each kind. Can that be automated? Can I make a factory that will make an arbitrary fastener in small quantities (say 1,000) efficiently or cost effectively? You know steel rod in one side of various diameters and fasteners out the other. And then what would the API be to that factory? Select Head, diameter, material, length, quantity? Maybe finish?

One of the things that mixing sizes on the assembly line would have is keeping them separate, but have you seen how fast a pick-n-place robot can sort things? Could you just have a tray full of random fasteners come out of the anodizing tank and have a robot sort them into types?

Very interesting times coming up.

[kanzure]

> Now personally I love manufacturing porn, I don't know why but I can watch an hour or two of 'How its Made' and just spin all these ideas about in my head.

I also like manufacturing porn, so I made a playlist you might like:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0EB93E6E02E5CF17&...

[inmygarage]

There is definitely automation, but it's far from ubiquitous and there are huge swings from industry to industry. Some industries are much farther along than others.

Also, if automation is almost everywhere how come Foxconn has 1.2 million employees?

[nickpinkston]

I'm guessing you've been to a lot of ::American:: plants - which have to deal with the salaries you speak of, but as OP pointed out - most of our consumer products (like an iPhone or a toaster) are largely made in China by lots of humans assembling by hand.

I was at Ford's Rouge River plant in Detroit and there were about 10 robots in the Assembly doing high-precision work (installing the windshield) - and a lot of ergonomics and fixturing for the overwhelming amount of humans that were screwing the F150's together by hand. I know this is partially the fault of unions - but still pretty crazy it's done like this.