Faced with labor shortages, many are turning to automation and robotics, even if it means huge investments.
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A few weeks ago, Prime Minister François Legault made a pretty direct statement: “There are SMEs that have two options. “Either they invest in robots or digitalization to increase their productivity, or they will disappear,” he said.
However, the prime minister’s statement may have come too late, as most SMEs in Quebec had already begun this transition, largely due to the difficulty of finding and retaining employees. This is what Le Journal discovered when it spoke to entrepreneurs gathered at the Salon Industriel in Terrebonne on October 18.
“Companies are looking for our products for two reasons. It allows them to solve their work problem but at the same time increases their productivity,” says Pierre Roger, representative at CFR, an SME in Sainte-Claire that offers automation and robotization solutions to companies in the agri-food and manufacturing sectors Sector.
“Plus, robots are super simple these days, and since young people are good with electronics, you can hire a student to operate them and it costs a lot less,” he says.
His company is currently developing a program to weld pipes like a plumber would. But here it is a robot that works 100% with X-rays and camera vision. In the long term, investing in this technology will save customers a lot of money. “My robot is never tired, it doesn’t whine, it doesn’t take a meal break and it doesn’t go to the toilet,” he says.
CFR recently delivered two robots to a customer that work the “night shift.” “When our customer leaves in the evening, he turns off the lights and the robots work all night. One of the robots handles the parts and brings them to the other robot, which is a welder. And when the welding robot is finished, it takes the parts and puts them back on a pallet,” he says.
The customer’s factory is therefore operational 24 hours a day. But this productivity comes at a price: $100,000 for such robots.
This is one of the reasons why some SMEs are reluctant to invest such amounts given the economic uncertainty. “But they will order it later because they know they have no other choice due to the labor shortage,” adds Pierre Roger.