Automation Action: OTC and area manufacturers make technology investments

Aside from serving as the largest project in Ozarks Technical Community College’s history, the August 2022 opening of its $40 million Robert W. Plaster Center for Advanced Manufacturing signaled the start of an automation and robotics program.

It’s a new offering that school and manufacturing officials hope can help skill up a workforce in an industry that is both hungry for workers and willing to invest in technology to build toward the future.

The associate degree for OTC’s automation and robotics program prepares students for careers including maintenance technician, automation analyst and robotics engineer. The average annual salary in Missouri for those manufacturing jobs is $71,280, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Danelle Maxwell, industrial and manufacturing department chair at OTC, said the college has offered basic instruction in automation for over 15 years, beginning as industrial maintenance technology.

“We’ve added some advanced automation controls and created very specific coursework for an automation and robotics associate degree that started this fall,” she said.

OTC spokesperson Mark Miller said the new degree and the long-standing mechatronics program parallel each other in the first year. In the second year, the automation and robotics students go into more specialized instruction, whereas the mechatronics courses remain more generalized.

Maxwell said foundational classes for the new program include industrial electricity, programmable logic controllers and industrial safety.

“The manufacturing industry was very adamant that they needed to understand those foundational levels of how machines work and how to troubleshoot them before they could then go into automating them,” she said.

Past instruction in automation and mechatronics were in the school’s Industry Transportation Technology Center, but all courses and equipment moved in the fall to the 120,000-square-foot PMC, said Rodney Boyer, automation and robotics instructor.

“We have a much larger facility here,” he said. “That certainly helps as we have a lot more classroom and lab space where we can accommodate more students.”

The need to bolster hiring in the manufacturing industry is substantial, according to a 2021 study by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, the workforce development and education partner of the National Association of Manufacturers. It said the manufacturing skills gap in the U.S. could result in 2.1 million unfilled positions by 2030, noting the cost of those missing jobs could potentially total $1 trillion in 2030 alone.

Matchmaking
The PMC also has roughly 15,000 square feet in industry partner space, which has been occupied since October by Lebanon-based manufacturer DT Engineering. Owner and CEO Jim Sheldon signed a one-year lease for an undisclosed rate, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting. He said his company’s arrival at the PMC serves as a company expansion, adding the 1933-founded DT Engineering employs 105, with 13 in Springfield. Three of those 13 local employees are current students or graduates of OTC, he added.

The company works at the PMC on automation products mostly for pharmaceutical and clean industrial purposes, he said. Some of its equipment dispenses medical tablets and pills into compliance packaging, but Sheldon declined to disclose company clients due to intellectual property concerns.

“It’s far more efficient,” he said of his company’s automated equipment in the PMC. “It has a triple redundancy in the way it counts the tablets, so it’s more accurate than a human.”

While declining to disclose his investment in the company since buying it in 2016, Sheldon said the expansion to OTC’s campus is repositioning DT Engineering toward technology transformation.

“The Springfield facility is more specifically for our technology movement. Higher technology equipment is going there,” he said, noting the timing to connect with OTC as it opened the PMC “couldn’t have been better.”

“It was a match made in heaven,” he said.

DT Engineering’s presence provides a showcase for automation equipment at work, Maxwell said.

“From a tour guide perspective, it’s been great to stop, look and see what they’re doing and for our guests to see what the immediate application of these classes are teaching,” she said.

Getting equipped
Automation has been part of company operations at Multi-Craft Contractors Inc. for about a decade, said Steve Kruse, automation and robotics division manager. While Kruse declined to disclose recent automation investments, officials in 2019 noted the company had invested $1.5 million-$2 million over the prior five years.

“We’ve invested quite a bit recently in computer numerical control machinery, lasers, robotic waterjet cutting and automated press brake equipment,” he said of Multi-Craft, which provides automation and engineering services to food processing and manufacturing companies. “It increases the throughput of our manufacturing processes and increases our process control and quality of our products.”

Dustin Davenport, general manager of SRC Heavy Duty, aka Springfield ReManufacturing Corp., said his division has spent well over $2 million on automation equipment the past couple of years. The company remanufactures diesel engines and components, turbochargers and fuel systems, among other products, according to its website, and is one of 12 subsidiaries of SRC Holdings Corp.

“We’re looking for repetitive operations that make the most sense for automation, at least to start with,” he said, adding the equipment can relieve an employee from doing tasks dozens of times a day and free them up to do other work.

Both Kruse and Davenport say their companies’ investments in automation are here to stay.

“It’s an ongoing yearly discussion with our capital, as to what are we going to do next,” Davenport said, adding automation can replace dirty, dangerous and physically demanding work for humans. “What’s the next challenge to make that job less painful, per se, for the operator?”

Orders for workplace robots, a major staple of automation, increased in the U.S. by 25% in the second quarter of 2022 over the same period in 2021, according to the Association for Advancing Automation, the robotics industry’s trade group. Year-over-year robot orders climbed 22% in 2021.

OTC also was able to acquire new automation equipment at the PMC, mostly purchased through grants, Maxwell said. One of those was a $345,725 grant issued by the National Science Foundation, which she said the school used to buy programmable logic controllers for classrooms, as well as invest in a camp related to automation and robotics planned this summer for grades seven-10.

While the long-term interest for OTC’s new technical training program remains to be seen, Maxwell said the PMC building already is a draw for prospective students.

“It is showing them what this program is about. It’s very visible for tours, visitors and groups,” she said. “Whenever they can see the robots collectively grouped together, it’s a pretty visually appealing
recruitment tool.”