Renting robots to help factories do the worst jobs

Employees at S&F Foods dreaded lifting heavy cardboard boxes from a conveyor belt and placing them onto pallets for shipment all day.

- Farah Stockman

So Mr Mike Calleja, the plant manager for the company, which makes frozen food for school cafeterias, hired a robot.

Buying a robot could cost as much as US$500,000 (S$641,000), and Mr Calleja wasn't even confident that one would work. Instead, he rented a robot from Formic, a Woodridge, Illinois, firm that takes care of installation, training, programming and repairs. It costs about US$23 an hour, roughly the same as a human.

"We have very low turnover because we try to make jobs easier," Mr Calleja said of the company, which is outside Detroit. "We are a small facility, but we produce about 65,000 pounds of food a day." Stacking it was "a backbreaking job," he said.

In an era when manufacturers consistently list attracting and retaining workers as a top challenge, companies are automating some of the worst jobs in their plants as a worker retention strategy.

The robot rental model has the potential to transform the American industrial base by making automation accessible to small and medium-sized businesses that have traditionally been slow to adopt new technology.

Of the roughly 244,000 manufacturers in the United States, about 93 per cent have fewer than 100 workers and 75 per cent have fewer than 20, according to the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Those small and medium-sized companies often lack the capital or in-house knowledge to integrate new equipment into their assembly lines.

"That's where the opportunity is," said Mr Saman Farid, chief executive of Formic, which rents robots to about 150 different factories across the country.