This article was originally written by WTiN and was published in WTiN’s Textile 4.0 – issue 4 2020. The original article can be accessed here.
Madelaine Thomas, from WTiN talks to Andrew Steward, founder and managing director of ALS Mechatronic about automation in the textile & apparel industry in the post Covid-19 manufacturing landscape
Covid-19 has changed the textile manufacturing landscape as we know it. In the short-term, companies are doing what they can to manage the pandemic, with some manufacturers changing their production floors to suit the new demand for PPE products such as face masks and hospital gowns. This fast turnaround requires flexibility and digital technologies. To survive long-term, companies along the textile value chain are quickly realising that digitalisation is the only answer to survival in what will become the new normal. With the way we manufacture changing, so follows new manufacturing environments: the acceleration of the near- and re-shoring movement and new business models is a popular conversation. Consequently, digitalisation is key.
One company aiming to help others to successfully digitalise across the value chain and multiple industries is ALS Mechatronic. Formerly ALS Controls, ALS Mechatronic is a bespoke factory automation and control systems specialist. The UK-based company recently changed its name to better reflect its full capabilities as it is set to expand into new industry sectors – such as textiles and apparel – and commit to greater expansion in the US, opening offices in Texas.
Andrew Steward, founder and managing director of ALS Mechatronic, says: “Mechatronic is a much better term than controls as it covers much more of the things we do. We make machinery, we don’t just make control systems. We create, we invent, we build the machinery. We are the bones as well as the brains.” The company was set up in 2002 from the spare room of Steward’s flat. He says: “We were writing software and building control systems back then. We’ve now grown to a 10,000 sq. ft. facility and we currently employ 22 people. We specialise in bespoke factory automation and control systems, typically automating with machines and software replacing repeatable labour-intensive manufacturing processes.”
A large market for the company is the dairy industry with high-speed conveyors, bagging, debagging, robotics and packaging for milk bottles, but there’s not many industries that the company doesn’t support. “We work in food and beverage, waste, energy, converting old textile scraps to produce power, packaging, healthcare and pharmaceuticals,” says Steward. “So, we’re very varied. We deliver simple control systems and upgrades right through to full factory automation systems.” The company’s customers include small, upcoming companies through to large multinationals and big brands all over the world. Steward continues: “We love the challenges that our customers come to us with and to date we’ve always come up with a solution. That’s why I love what we do. No two projects are the same. We are ‘solutioneers’ – not engineers. We love to find solutions for people.”
Automating the Workforce
The coronavirus pandemic has not only affected the textile market, but those in the automation industry as well, such as ALS Mechatronic. Steward says: “Covid-19 has had a definite impact in a number of ways. Our export sales have dropped off a cliff, we just can’t get anywhere to install things. We still get enquiries, our US customers and prospects for example are keen to get us back out there once the restrictions lift. We’ve always done a lot in the US so that’s a real problem for us.”
Covid-19 is teaching everyone in industry different lessons. I hope it brings on the manufacturing revolution – where we try to produce more locally, rather than rely heavily on Asia. Andrew Steward, ALS Mechatronic
However, in the UK, the company has become much busier as local companies realise the need to automate. “Covid-19 is teaching everyone in every industry different lessons,” comments Steward. “I hope it brings on the manufacturing revolution where we try to produce more locally rather than relying heavily on Asia. Clothing and textiles are, of course, a huge industry. The ‘Made in Britain’ brand is a major export opportunity but to be able to compete with the lower cost production like in China and Asia – even if manufacturers do invest in automation – we [the UK] just can’t compete. We’re never going to be able to compete with mass cheap labour,” he adds. However, by automating factories it can also reduce the textile & apparel industry’s dependence on low-skilled labour, which is beneficial in a number of ways. Steward says: “Since Brexit, a huge proportion of the UK’s low skilled labour market has disappeared back to Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Most of our customers are struggling to find low-skilled labour, there’s nobody there to work, nobody wants to do the job.” Therefore, the automation of factories – rather than putting people out of work, which is often the assumption when automation or robotics are discussed – can actually make mass scale manufacturing in the UK more viable as the workforce simply does not exist in the scale that it is required to meet market demands. Consumer nations such as the UK and the US today naturally create more jobs for skilled workers. Steward explains: “The UK’s low-skilled market is struggling, but by putting automation in we now need engineers and technicians. We need higher skilled people and we need less of them. We can now employ people on decent wages to look after certain bits of machinery.”
Automation inspection systems are a good example of this, says Steward. “We can inspect hundreds of parts a minute to ensure they perform exactly how they’re supposed to. Whereby using humans on repetitive work like that, just due to the monotony and the complexity of the inspection, faults are missed and quality drops.” Automation also eradicates many issues associated with a human workforce, Steward continues. He says: “Machines don’t need breaks. Repetitive work is very hard to do with low-skilled labour. It needs to be perfectly repeatable. Machines do exactly the same thing every time: to the millimetre, not roughly close.” Additionally, as Covid-19 spreads the globe, automation reduces the amount of people required in factories which makes social distancing easier while maintaining production levels. “Imagine how a toilet roll factory would have coped without automation in the current climate – and the food industry. The country would be in uproar if the milk industry ground to a halt. I like to think ALS Mechatronic played a small part in keeping those areas well stocked in the early days of the crisis. We were running around all over the country making sure everything was working and everything was correct,” says Steward.
Measuring up the benefits
As well as removing the need for low-paid workers out of the equation and developing skills, there are also other obvious benefits to investing in automation, such as improving efficiency and, importantly, cost. “When you automate something, your costs are driven down,” says Steward. “The speed of production or your output rate improves; the quality improves no-end because of the repeatability; safety is improved. There is no repetitive working, you get consistency – everything is exactly the same, whatever it is you’re making. These are the main benefits of automation,” he adds. Although consistency is incredibly important, particularly in mass producing goods, a big trend in the textile & apparel industry and in consumer goods in general is customised products, particularly in near and reshoring markets where smaller batch sizes have become the norm. Automation ready for flexibility and customisation, according to Steward, is all part of ALS Mechatronic’s offering. “With everything we do, everything is always changing – be it bottled beer to textiles, machinery, everybody wants it for multiple products and that’s what we’re all geared up to do. It’s always change on the fly, we want to make 2000 of this and then 10,000 of that, for example – the machines change automatically and carry on,” he says.
Another benefit of automation is that it can be a more environmentally friendly way of manufacturing, particularly in the notoriously unsustainable textile manufacturing industry. Steward comments: “Covid-19 has opened all our eyes to many areas in life that need to change, not least what we are doing to the planet and how we need to stop being so wasteful, recycle more and stop putting all [our rubbish] in landfill – or worse, still polluting the oceans.” He notes that we need to use green energy. “Waste energy is one of our big areas of working: creating green energy from waste products. The industrial revolution is pictured with endless smog and chimneys, hopefully in the 21st century we will see a manufacturing revolution where the picture becomes that of cleaner air, a cleaner ocean and maybe Covid-19 is the catalyst to make this happen,” he says.
Bottlenecks
However, there are also a number of challenges for companies like ALS Mechatronic when it comes to automation, mindset and costs. Steward says that the first major challenge for ALS Mechatronic is coming up with the right solution to a new problem. “That’s the biggest challenge. We’ve got to come up with a plausible, workable solution. Then you’ve got to get the customers to have the faith to move towards the automation with the upfront investment required because it’s never cheap – it’s always a long-term investment – be it only a one year or two year investment, but it’s still measured in years rather than weeks normally.”
The challenge quickly changes when customer’s do decide to take the leap and automate – it becomes about managing expectations. “Customers start the automation with a little project and then see how much better it works – they then want more to add on to what we have built and of course they want it straight away,” says Steward. Or a successful first phase in automating production has created a bottleneck elsewhere among the production line that has yet to be automated. “Now the rest of the process is lagging behind, so it’s then about trying to keep your customers mind under control,” he adds.
While the textile & apparel industry is new to ALS Mechatronic, Steward says it has a lot in common with the packaging industry such as, “rolling, collating, cutting, stitching, creating machines to automate each part of the process,” he says. “Producing the final product from right at the top of the control room.” Steward continues: “Textiles is one of the new industry sectors that we can easily support. All it needs is some bright spark in the industry to say ‘we can do this better, easier, faster, more economically if the machine can do X, Y and Z’ and that’s when we will come up with a solution.”
Having worked in many different industry sectors to date, Steward and his team have managed to create a solution to all the challenges they faced – and these skills are easily transferable to automating textile manufacturing production lines across the supply chain.
He notes that, one of the main issues in the textile & apparel manufacturing industry is cheap, unregulated labour. “This has made it impossible to compete on price in Europe. But with automation [in Europe] we should be able to drive prices down to much nearer to what is expected whilst increasing quality and creating jobs in the UK and Europe. Steward is a big advocate of Made in Britain with British manufacturing and British engineering and comments that, with automation, this is made possible as less resources are needed – particularly in the textile industry which is a very labour-intensive market.
The factory of the future
No matter when or how industries decide to invest and upgrade its technology, the factory of the future is coming – for Steward, the factory of the future revolves around automation. “The future of manufacturing will be a case of utilising, wherever possible, automation and automatic inspections using machinery, control systems and robotics as well.” He continues: “AGVs (automatic guided vehicles) – little forklifts that run around the factories all automatically with no humans involved – will move stuff around, deliver to the manufacturing lines, collect parts, etc.” This will mean less reliance on low-skilled, low-paid workers on the shop floor who are getting harder to recruit and instead employing highly skilled, high-paid technicians and engineers to make it all work in complete synchronicity. “And in doing so, that cost-production is then highly competitive,” Steward concludes.
