Automation in manufacturing operations

In the world of sportswear, function typically outweighs form. But the limitations of traditional manufacturing practices have long stymied what’s possible with high-performing and innovative sports products.

“There’s this quote from Winston Churchill that I think about all the time in this regard — ‘First we design buildings, then the buildings design us,” said Michael Baker, global head of brand and communications at 3D-printing company Formlabs. “We make things with right corners or hard edges, not because they make better products, but because they’re easier to make at scale.” 

3D manufacturing and other additive manufacturing techniques can offer ways to push past typical production restrictions when it comes to design, prototyping, cost and efficiency.

Quicker prototyping and more opportunities for innovation

For many manufacturers, the biggest advantage in using additive processes is in their potential to quickly prototype and iterate designs. 

“Customers like TaylorMade [Golf], in the golf space, are asking us to quickly test out different form factors, geometries and weights of products,” Baker said. “They’ll try out 10 or 20 different shapes of a driver’s head, for example, before casting or molding.”

That’s traditionally a task that might have taken weeks or even months; 3D manufacturing can shave that time frame down to a single day, according to Baker.

“Instead of saying, ‘Oh, we can run this print today and then tomorrow we’ll have another version, and the next day we’ll have another version,’ you can actually change the workflow and say, ‘Today I’m going to come up with three different types and I’m going to give them to a focus group and they can see how these things change over the course of a day,” he said.

Shortening the prototyping time frame can also make product design more integral to the product development cycle, emboldening people to “think more creatively about what’s possible,” Baker added.

Enhancing small batch production

Improving efficiency across various steps of the manufacturing process is especially important for organizations like Varsity Brands and its subsidiary, BSN Sports, a manufacturer of sporting goods apparel for schools and leagues.

With its minimum order quantity ranging from a single unit to a dozen, Varsity Brands has found gaining efficiency in its small batch manufacturing production process an enormous challenge, according to Chief Innovation Officer Kurt Hagen.

Hagen said that his organization has primarily used 3D manufacturing to improve the sampling process. While before, one would have had to "order some very expensive molds that took a really long time to sample," Hagen says that 3D-printing allows the company to produce samples much faster.

“3D manufacturing allows you to look, feel, and touch [various samples], giving you more variety of choice,” Hagen says. “Before, you would have had to order some very expensive molds that took a really long time to sample.”

Unique shapes and constructions that enable high performance

Speed and efficiency aside, 3D manufacturing can also be a boon to high-volume manufacturers who want to innovate the construction of traditional sportswear, like shoes.

While working with New Balance, Formlabs helped design a new type of midsole shoe formed with resilient “lattice structures” that cradle different parts of the foot with varied support, boosting performance. Such nuanced design might not have been possible in a traditional manufacturing process, which would have required the production of various uniform layers that are then glued and stitched together.

Such unique shapes are made possible through the marriage of distinctive materials specifically developed for the 3D manufacturing process with the unconventional designs that additive manufacturing makes accessible.

“In the last five to eight years, there has been a huge explosion of elastomeric materials, heat-sensitive or fire-resistant, or extremely durable glass material — so things that actually mimic the properties of traditional manufacturing,” Baker said.

Baker added that materials are “half our business” and that Formlabs has more than 30 material science experts onsite to develop materials that fit every need — even FDA-cleared elastics used for sports guards.

How business owners can explore additive manufacturing

Speed is one of the most talked-about assets of 3D printing. But adopting 3D manufacturing processes might require some manufacturers to slow down and establish a digital foundation before exploring its opportunities, Hagen said.

“If a manufacturer is not digitally designing products, that’s going to be a ginormous barrier to entry,” Hagen said. “There’s a lot of use cases [with digital models] but you need to make sure you have the assets in place to allow them.”

The benefits of the technology is one of the most marked he’s experienced, though. 

“I personally have not heard of anybody who’s gone down this path and did not realize the benefits,” Hagen said. “I have not heard from anybody that has made the jump and regretted it.”

Dive Brief:

• Nucor is investing in automation to manufacture its steel products as it looks to cut costs and boost factory safety, the company’s CEO Leon Topalian said on a Q2 earnings call on July 22. 
• As part of its automation investment, Nucor is working on automating its material handling equipment at multiple plants, including upcoming plants in Indiana and Alabama. 
• “We're seeing the potential applications of AI and automation in a whole raft of different areas of our businesses, technologies that we're using to deploy to create safer outcomes from our team members, to create cost advantages, to create efficiencies,” Topalian said on the call.

Dive Insight:

The steel giant highlighted it had the safest first half of any year in the company’s history, with 52 of its 109 divisions accomplishing Nucor’s ultimate goal of zero recordable injuries. 

In its towers and structures business unit, which the company expanded in 2022, Nucor is building two utility structures production plants in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and Decatur, Alabama. The plants will feature automated material handling equipment, as well as robotic plasma and weld cells, EVP of New Markets and Innovation Chad Utermark said on the call. 

“As a reminder, many of our downstream businesses in Nucor face these demand fluctuations through the cycle,” Utermark said. “And what we are seeing is that automation in key manufacturing areas can really help us navigate that demand fluctuation so that we can really take care of our customers.”

Nucor’s steel products segment saw larger volumes but a lower average selling price due to higher material costs, Nucor noted in its earnings presentation. Overall, Nucor’s sales decreased 15% year over year to $8.1 billion in Q2. 

The steel company is also using AI at a steel mill in Memphis, Tennessee, to optimize production scheduling.

“We've been able to reduce the man hours committed to this process by about 80% through the use of AI,” EVP of Fabricated Construction Products John Hollatz said on the call.

In other areas of automation, Nucor has been developing a robotic joist line at its Vulcraft, South Carolina, facility since 2018. Joist production traditionally is a very labor-intensive process, but the robotic technologies have helped Nucor cut costs and create operational efficiencies, Hollatz said. 

“This new robotic line, which we have been operating now for about one year, utilizes patented robotics and vision technology, to perform the assembly and welding of joist,” Hollatz said. “This is really a game changer for our team, and we're looking to grow this across the rest of our joist operations in the future.”

Other steel companies are investing in automation as well. US Steel is investing in automated storage and retrieval systems, manufactured by Pittsburgh-based Freespace Robotics, the company announced in March 2024.

3D printing has taken much of the manufacturing world by storm — and the food industry could be up next.

Manufacturers across the aerospace, automotive and energy industries are working to boost adoption of additive manufacturing among their suppliers and in their factories for its ability to alleviate supply shortages and enhance product customization. Motivated by the technology’s potential benefits, Robin Simsa embarked on his journey to establish Austria-based seafood startup Revo Foods in 2020.

While working on his doctorate in cultivated meat, Simsa discovered an additive technology that could integrate a fat component into plant protein fibers to create more realistic meat alternatives.

“As often in startups, you have a new finding, you figure out there’s no industrial way to do it, and then you’re foolish enough to start it yourself,” the CEO said.

Revo Foods’ first product — 3D-printed salmon fillets — hit Austrian supermarkets in September 2023, the first 3D-printed food to ever be sold in grocery stores, according to the company. The startup already plans to scale production with its multi-nozzle system, which combines multiple print heads within a single piece of production machinery.

Revo Foods uses extrusion to manufacture its alternative seafood products, a common 3D printing process in which a material is squeezed through a nozzle in successive layers to recreate an object from a digital file. The startup’s patented food printing technology lets it precisely combine its plant-based protein and fat ingredients, making its final products more authentic in terms of cooking and mouthfeel, Simsa said. 

One of the earliest things the startup focused on achieving was a continuous extrusion process. “Normally, this is a batch process, and it’s very hard to think in terms of scale,” Simsa noted.

Although companies like Revo Foods are advancing in the realm of 3D-printed food, scalability remains a significant challenge.

“The largest obstacle for 3D printing to overcome is throughput,” said Edwin Palang, senior commercialization manager for food R&D firm Mattson. “When we talk to co-manufacturers, the first thing they ask [about] right away is volume.”

Palang underscored the efficiency gap between the technology and traditional food production methods, for example when making a hamburger patty. The quickest he had observed a 3D patty get formed was in about two minutes, whereas conventional processes can churn out about 130 patties in that time. 

However, Palang still believes 3D printing could have a place in the food industry, mainly for high-end products. This includes items that require complex shapes that traditional manufacturing can’t deliver, such as alternative premium meat cuts and highly marbled fish fillets.

“The benefit of 3D printing here extends beyond customization; it supports the creation of sustainable, alternative protein sources that closely replicate the taste and texture of high-end meats and seafood,” he said.

Consumer demand for seafood has skyrocketed in recent decades, with more than a third of global fish stocks overfished as of 2019, according to the United Nations. Revo Foods aims its product portfolio at bridging this gap, and it is not the only company to do so.

Since December, Israel-based food tech company Steakholder Foods has unveiled two 3D-printed seafood products: eel and shrimp. The $4.3 billion eel market faces severe challenges like overexploitation and the threat of extinction, the company said in a press release, emphasizing the need for sustainable alternatives as demand continues to grow.

In a statement, CEO Arik Kaufman touted the company’s patented printing technology’s ability to reproduce the intricate texture of an eel on a potential scale of hundreds of tons a month at lower costs than harvesting wild eel. The CEO also highlighted the process’ flexibility to make a range of printed products using the same production line.

Mattson’s EVP of Product Development and Commercialization Jaime Reeves said companies exploring 3D-printed food are currently focusing on products that already have a premium price point. 

“It’s a really awesome technology, but the thought that it’s going to take over and be equivalent to regular meat production is hard to imagine at this point, from what we’ve seen and the people we’ve talked to in the industry,” Reeves said.

Still, Purdue Professor of Mechanical Engineering Ajay Malshe believes 3D-printed food could be scaled within the next decade.

“Additive manufacturing technology is, in my mind, at a commercial level for metals and polymers,” Malshe said. “A lot of those equipment design know-hows are being repurposed in the food industry.”

He suggested that incentives for food producers to adopt the technology could transcend the high-end market.

Using 3D printing, food producers could tailor the typically large footprint of their manufacturing plants to bring production closer to consumers by creating custom, modular food manufacturing platforms. These would lower transportation costs and have the potential benefit of using local resources to create products, according to Malshe.

He also highlighted shifting consumer preferences as another driving force, particularly as younger generations become increasingly aware of the origin and quality of their purchases.

“The ‘where my food comes from,’ people do want to know that – they want the traceability of that,” Malshe said.

Sustainability in manufacturing is no longer a buzzy phrase reserved for boardroom aspirations.

New emissions regulations in the U.S., such as the Securities and Exchange Commission’s March 2024 climate disclosure rule, as well as eco-conscious consumer sentiments, are increasingly tying a company’s long-term performance to its ability to reduce emissions. More often, achieving sustainability and implementing smart factory operations are becoming one and the same.

“I strongly believe that if you want your business to have longevity, you need to be thinking about both digital and sustainability, regardless of your company size,” said Rodrigo Alves, sustainability and energy management business EMEA manager at Rockwell Automation subsidiary Kalypso.

Digitalization can optimize energy consumption, improve product yield and optimize performance, said Neal Walters, a partner in Kearney’s strategic operations practice. 

“Even if a manufacturing facility is using exclusively renewable energy, reducing energy consumption will have an overall positive environmental impact,” Walters said. “Second, improving product yield among other benefits leads to less waste disposal and lower energy consumption. And [a third key area is in] minimizing paper transactions — many factories have thousands of square meters set aside for paper storage.”

For smaller companies that may be overwhelmed by the idea of letting go of old methods and tools, Alves added that conglomerate-level resources are far from necessary.

“I’m sure any production or operations manager could think of a manual process that someone follows every week that could be automated without the need to make a huge investment in software,” Alves said. “Something that you could automate with Tableau, Excel. Start small.” 

A good place to start is by automating audits so that instead of doing an annual audit of emissions, they are regularly monitored, Alves added. 

Collecting data is exactly how EOS, a provider of 3D-printed manufacturing solutions, set out to reach their sustainability goals.

“Both for environmental goals as well as social goals, the foundation is always data. You need to measure what you want to manage,” said EOS Head of Sustainability Björn Hannappel. “Creating more transparency first can help you identify the areas you want to improve, while also helping monitor the progress you make.”

To accurately measure their outputs, EOS installs an energy meter into new machines that tracks power and gas consumptions. The company also measures powder consumption and powder waste stream, since powder is a key material used in their 3D printers. 

“By combining these you can get a better idea of the manufacturing cost, but also, the sustainability and emissions of operations,” said Trevor Kirsten, head of digital manufacturing at EOS.

For EOS, increased data around their emissions can help them decipher where they could cut back on energy usage. 

“So by having that transparency, for instance, you might find areas where maybe the machine was turned on instead of turned off," said Hannappel. "[Or] one might find out that a machine had very high energy consumption, although it wasn't producing something.

Another way that data transparency can drive sustainable decisions is when the digitized information is presented to the consumer or client, who is then empowered to make sustainable decisions.

EOS offers this information in the form of a “carbon calculator,” which lets the customer see not only the cost per part, but also the carbon emissions per part and allows them to see how using a carbon-reduced powder might change their carbon footprint.

Beyond data, Hannappel adds that automating as many operations as possible is important to a smooth smart factory operation. 

That’s because, “if you’re talking about automation of a factory, then I think automation immediately includes optimization as well. Because you would never automate an inefficient process,” Hannappel said. “So for example, if you have a robot that feeds a machine, you would never program the robot to drive around the whole city and come back into the door and then feed it. But if you’re looking at analog processes, sometimes it is like that.” 

It’s an idea reiterated by Walters, who said that, “If a factory has flaws in the basic fundamentals of manufacturing, the famous adage that ‘if you digitize a bad process, you’ll just get a digitized bad process’ certainly applies.

Dive Brief:

• Utz Brands plowed ahead with its plan to shrink its manufacturing network in Q2 2024, part of a strategy to cut costs while focusing on distribution and market gains.
• The company sold two plants — in Michigan and Pennsylvania — to chip brand Our Home in April 2024. Utz has shed at least six of its plants over the past several months through a mixture of closures and divestments, leaving it with eight current facilities.
• The salty snack brand is using the funds from those sales to pay down debt and expand into new markets. "We've always talked a little bit about the opportunity for us to expand gross margins and then decide how to deploy them in marketing, distribution gains, as well as in capability building," CEO Howard Friedman said during the company's Q2 earnings call.

Dive Insight:

Utz is one of several food manufacturers trying to balance its bottom line against the need to get ahead in a competitive market.

The company has shuttered or sold facilities in locations such as Hanover, Pennsylvania; Birmingham, Alabama; Lincolnton, North Carolina; and Lititz, Pennsylvania, as part of a supply chain overhaul launched in December 2023. The plan aims to save $135 million over three years.

The strategy included plans to reduce production costs by $90 million through lean manufacturing, improved sourcing and automation, as well as saving $45 million through network optimization. Automation initiatives, another aspect of the plan, have led to 50% headcount reductions in pretzel rod packaging and small bag packaging operations, according to a company presentation.

At the same time, Utz is getting aggressive about growing its distribution capacity by expanding two logistics centers in Alabama and Arizona and building a third in Pennsylvania. The expansions are part of Utz's bid to step into new retailers and markets across the country.

"If you think back to Investor Day, what we had said was that we would be growing volume share, that it had always been for us a volume-based program," Friedman said on the Q2 call. "And it's really because we're able to bring our core brands and sort of mix them into the geographies that they are less penetrated in as we go forward."

Utz has also outsourced its fleet and on Aug. 12 announced it purchased distribution rights for 65 routes in south Florida from third-party direct-store-delivery provider National Food Corp. The purchase is part of Utz's bid to focus more on direct-store-delivery as part of its distribution strategy.

"Our productivity program has been pretty strong throughout the first half. You should see that strength and that delivery continue," Friedman said. "Our supply chain team is doing a great job accelerating the program as well as investing where we need to in our network to get ready for 2025 as well.”

Dive Brief:

• Tyson Foods opened an automated bacon processing plant on Jan. 25 in Bowling Green, Kentucky, significantly expanding production and allowing the meat giant to innovate with new products.
• The 400,000-square-foot facility, which will employ 450 workers, has enough capacity to process 2 million pounds of Jimmy Dean and Wright’s branded bacon for food service and retail every week. It features box-stacking robots and other advanced automation capabilities to promote efficiency while reducing workplace injuries.
• “This enables us to focus on the health and safety of our team members while also delivering the best in class service for customers,” CEO Donnie King said in a statement. Tyson also opened a highly automated chicken plant in Danville, Virginia, in November 2023 following a string of facility closures and downsizing to shore up costs in 2023.

Dive Insight:

The new factory allows Tyson to further experiment with bacon flavors, cuts and products such as fully-cooked bacon, the company said. Tyson selected Bowling Green partially because of the plant’s proximity to raw materials in its pork supply chain, as well as inbound and outbound transportation lanes. Pork bellies will be provided primarily by Tyson's pork segment, the company said.

“Bacon is a growing category based on consumer demand, both at home and at restaurants, and our expanded production will enable us to lead this growth and drive innovation,” Melanie Boulden, group president of prepared foods and chief growth officer at Tyson, said in a statement.

Beyond capacity, Tyson said it designed the plant with worker safety and well-being in mind. High-tech robots are there to “help eliminate ergonomically stressful tasks,” such as transporting large pork bellies along production lines and stacking boxes. There are also driverless forklifts and autonomous guide vehicles that move products through production zones.

Tyson is leaning into automation to boost efficiency. In November 2023, Tyson began production at a $300 million chicken nugget factory in Danville, Virginia, with automated case packing lines and high-speed robotic case palletizing units.

The plant openings come after Tyson closed six chicken processing plants in October 2023 as it dealt with rising input costs, unfavorable commodity markets and waning consumer demand. The company also closed two case-ready meat plants in Florida and South Carolina in fall 2023, affecting hundreds of workers.

Tyson broke ground on the Bowling Green location in February 2022 as consumer habits shifted post-COVID and demand rose for bacon and pork bellies.

Prices of sliced bacon surged nearly 40% after March 2020, surpassing $7 at the retail counter, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. In 2023, prices softened some as the industry navigated an oversupply of hogs and shoppers faced higher costs at the grocery store. Bacon averaged $6.77 per pound in December 2023.

Dive Brief:

• Rockwell Automation will use Nvidia’s artificial intelligence software in its autonomous mobile robots, the two companies announced in June. 
• The automation company will integrate Nvidia's AI robot development platform, dubbed Isaac, into Rockwell's Otto autonomous mobile robots, meant for use in manufacturing facilities.
• The project is part of an ongoing collaboration between the two companies to expand the use of AI in manufacturing. In March 2024, Nvidia and Rockwell announced they were working together to create digital twin software that incorporated the AI chipmaker's Omniverse cloud platform.

Dive Insight:

Rockwell is pushing to bring AI to more of its products as a way to better tap into customer needs. 

The company is also working with Microsoft to offer new AI-powered data solutions as it seeks to further its AI portfolio. Rockwell expanded its partnership with Microsoft in the fall of 2023 to add the tech giant's OpenAI software to its industrial automation cloud platform.

“By combining Microsoft’s AI capabilities and trusted cloud platform with Rockwell’s industrial automation solutions, manufacturers will have the tools they need to speed up these objectives and create smart factories of the future,” Dominik Wee, corporate VP of manufacturing and mobility at Microsoft, said in an April 2024 statement. 

The work with both Nvidia and Microsoft is part of Rockwell’s strategy to focus on “specific customer use cases, especially those that will benefit from simulation and simplification using artificial intelligence,” Chairman and CEO Blake Moret said on a May 7 earnings call. 

“These partners recognize that machines and manufacturing processes represent an enormous largely untapped source of data,” Moret said. “They also know we have the manufacturing domain expertise to select the best use cases for their technology.”

Rockwell acquired the Otto bot as part of its acquisition of Clearpath Robotics in October 2023. The autonomous mobile robot is now part of Rockwell’s manufacturing portfolio, with customers including GE Aerospace, Cober Solutions and Mauser Packaging Solutions, according to its website. 

Companies have been using autonomous mobile robots for several years to boost warehouse efficiency and lower labor needs — Amazon and DHL Supply Chain both deploy the tech in their facilities. Now, however, more companies are integrating AI into robotics technology to boost its abilities.  

Nvidia, for example, boasts that more than a dozen robotics industry leaders are now using its Isaac platform, including BYD Electronics and Siemens. Siemens, which has multiple collaborations with Nvidia, is using the software to integrate vision AI into its industrial robotic ecosystem. Nvidia and Siemens plan to roll out new capabilities related to the tech later in 2024.