THE INTERVIEW JANUARY 2020
REDRESSING
THE BALANCE
The UK lags behind many of its industrial rivals when
it comes to the uptake of automation. MM sat down with
Tom Bouchier, MD of FANUC UK, to explore how the
onus is on management teams to solve the problem
BY CHRIS BECK
Manufacturing
Management: Why are
today’s managers so
reluctant to look at the
benefi ts of automation?
Tom Bouchier: A lot of top
management in the UK was
stung by automation in the ‘70s
and ‘80s, when it didn’t really do
everything that it was advertised
as doing. That has given us a
general reluctance to look again.
Everybody needs to be educated
on why to automate, from the
apprentices through to the key
decision makers.
We have to get the message
across that we can’t aff ord not
to automate – if everybody
else is, we can’t compete on
a level playing fi eld without
doing it. No one person has
responsibility for this problem:
not government, not business,
not industry – we’ve all messed
it up somewhere along the line,
and we’ve all got to fi x it. Where
we’re lacking is that automation
and robotics has more of a
negative connotation than it
has abroad, where they see it
as a positive. But if you look at
the fi gures, it doesn’t steal jobs:
Germany’s got seven or eight
times the robots that we’ve got,
but lower unemployment, so
how does automation steal jobs?
It makes you more effi cient –
you can make more, you can
sell more, you can employ more
people. If you’re making less,
all the business will do is get
rid of people. As an industry,
we need to get the message
to every level: don’t let your
learning experience stop in 1979!
We need to replace a negative
message with a positive one. If
we can achieve a joined-up eff ort
across academia, manufacturers
and government, we can get that
message across much easier.
MM: Has this reluctance
caused issues around skills?
TB: There is a 20-year skills
‘hole’ in the industry. For
example, I could probably get
a service engineer my age or I
could get one who is 25. But the
30 years in the middle are harder
to fi nd. The level of people
we’re seeing enter the industry
now certainly bodes well for
the next 10 years, but what we
need to do is get that upper level
management trained on why
they need to have automation,
not to be scared of it.
Around 70% of kids going
into school this September will
go into a job that doesn’t exist
yet. We should be loving that
– it’s a fantastic thing to look
forward to. Many people in the
industry have known since they were four that
they were going to work in a factory, because that’s
what their father did. And that’s not a bad thing,
but isn’t is so much more exciting to say, ‘I don’t
even know what my job is going to be in 15 years
because it’s not invented yet’. We therefore need
to upskill people to embrace that technology.
MM: Does automation have a role to play in
making the manufacturing industry appeal
to the next generation?
TB: We’re lucky in that robots are still seen by
kids as a ‘sexy’ area of engineering to get into, so if
we’re looking for apprentices to come to FANUC
and work on robots, and we have 40 fi rst year
apprentice spaces, we’re likely to get 40 applicants.
However, we need to get the message across that
it’s not just robotics that’s like that, it’s the whole
of engineering. The AMRC in Sheffi eld has done
a survey of schoolchildren and found that the
best-known engineer in the UK is the mechanic in
Coronation Street. That’s shocking when you think
of who we’ve had in this country, all the engineers,
the inventors, the manufacturers.
MM: Does this demonstrate that people just
see a career in engineering as fi xing your car
instead of the high-tech world it actually is?
TB: We’ve been bad as an industry in terms of
getting that message across and fi ghting that
perception. The only way we’ll do it is for FANUC
to work with other manufacturers and other
robotics companies to show people, as a joint
group, that this is a great place to be working
now. Another thing we need to do with regards
to education is to stop taking the innovation out
A recent open
day at FANUC’s
Coventry HQ
gave delegates
the chance to
explore the
company’s
latest robotics
solutions
22 www.manufacturingmanagement.co.uk
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