Hitachi Webinar Series – How Technology Can Help Bridge The Gap During Labor Shortages

christian i'm just going to let some people roll in and then we can start here in a minute or so sounds good all right i think we'll get started hello everyone happy new year and welcome to our first webinar of 2022 2022 yes and my name is tina aydah i am part of the marketing team here at hitachi industrial equipment and solutions america today's topic in our free hitachi webinar series is how technology can help bridge the gap during labor shortages i know this labor shortage has been such a hot topic lately and so many companies are struggling to find solutions so we're really excited to host this webinar today and before we start i'd like to go over some quick housekeeping items first just wanted to let everyone know this webinar is being reported and it will be available onto them so please feel free to share with your colleagues if they're unable to attend today and this is a live webinar so if you have any questions we ask that you type your questions into the q a box which can be found at the bottom of the zoom dashboard and the q a questions will be taken at the end of the session and we're going to try to answer as many as we can last this is a 30-minute webinar so we'll make sure to be mindful of your time and stay within that window and i'm excited to have this opportunity to get some insight from an industry expert live and touch on a topic that many people are talking about these days i'm honored to introduce christian chikfa he is the product manager of the marketing coding group here at hitachi and i've worked with christian for almost four years going on five years i believe and i can confidently say he has been my source to better understand the market and to just better understand what the customers need um as we try to keep up with this ever changing market so please join me in welcoming christian chikka hello christian and i'm really looking forward to this discussion today hi tina nice to speak with you again and welcome everybody to the webinar i think we've got a really interesting exciting topic to talk about it's definitely um something that we've seen a lot about in the news um and we hear around the office i'm sure which is the labor shortage so without further ado i'll jump right into it um so the bureau the us bureau of labor and statistics collects all sorts of data on um employment and uh that's where we get you know numbers like our unemployment rate and um in 2020 due to the pandemic and many other factors there is a massive reduction in the number of younger people entering jobs there's also an older workforce that is deciding to retire early which the the pandemic exacerbated um and so labor growth is predicted to only grow by 0.5 over the next decade and that's smaller than uh that's significantly smaller than the previous decade so um what we're seeing right now as a result of that is incredible demand for uh especially manufacturing jobs um i'm sure many of the people online can relate to having job postings available and not even seeing applicants or seeing applicants that perhaps aren't aren't qualified or you know not being able to fill the positions that they need to fill so we're seeing this trend all over the country and it's really unique to to the time that we're in right now however it's not necessarily unique throughout the history of time and throughout the trends and manufacturing that we've seen so i'm just going to at a very high level kind of illustrate that labor is always going to be one of the struggles one of the thresholds to have to cross in order to um see progress and innovation so you talk about something as ambitious as the pyramids of giza in egypt when the pharaohs undertook that their main problem was just having enough people to be able to do it right and so to overcome that problem they um utilized existing technologies came up with new technologies um simple tools like wheels and levers evolved into cranes and um you know historians talk about all sorts of advanced technologies that went specifically into solving that problem because labor couldn't solve it alone you couldn't find enough people to do what they were going to do and then you have something like henry ford and the um assembly line henry ford had an ambitious goal as well which was to um to put a model t into every home in america and in order to do that he simply could not have hired enough people um at the turn of the century to to make that many parts so again we see this example of innovation a change of thought uh changes in technology um even sometimes changes in philosophy as it relates to manufacturing and production and we see that as a response to a need for labor so it's not a new phenomenon that we're in and what we're seeing today is we're seeing increased pressure in markets that we're familiar with uh one of the largest markets for marketing and coding being food and bread beverage um the demand is not going down for food and beverage but i've already illustrated that the requirement or the availability of labor is down so we have this um this imbalance between the amount of demand between as an example industries like food and beverage and the availability of labor and this again is something we're seeing in 2022 but we've also been seeing it for generations so a little bit of history uh after the second world war processed foods became more of the norm more and more people were relying on production and manufacturing for a necessity which is to have food on the table and then into the 50s all the way through to the 70s products had additional requirements for marking and coding and so hitachi being for its entire history for the over 100 years that it's been a company has always focused on innovation and so this is no different hitachi was actually one of the first companies to pioneer the cij technology and to meet the requirement that we saw in the industry and it again pertains to labor because prior to this requirement for digital coding on products it was something that had to be done manually you either had to manually write onto a package what they had been packaged or apply some sort of sticker or label um and it simply couldn't be cost efficient to do that so we had a move into continuous inkjet printing and that was something that hitachi has really pioneered you know in christian i really like the title of the webinar where you use the term bridge the gap i feel like um personally these past few in-person trade shows that i've been to talking to attendees and exhibitors it's such a common topic and i feel like using the term bridge the gap you know really makes us think that we have to actively take action now to prepare for it and you know build a strong bridge per se because it seems like for most companies this labor force rate dropping is inevitable and to tie it all together i just wanted to kind of ask you how would you say these technologies impact the labor crisis we're seeing today so what's interesting and what i'm trying to illustrate is that um that you really have to rely on the past to figure out where you're going in the future and see what has worked and what hasn't worked so in order to tackle the labor crisis you have to look at um like i just said what has worked and so i'm going to spend just a minute and talk about um the main point of how i i think that we're going to tackle the labor crisis is to focus on how technology can do that and how new equipment can do that so i talked a little bit about the um the pioneering of cij printing and so here we have the first cij printer produced by um hitachi back in the 1970s for a large beverage manufacturer and this took several people to operate um and so it was at the time very new technology and it took a lot of time for operators to figure out um you know how to change messages how to replace fluids how to keep the machine running in general because it was brand new engineering so as we iterate beyond that you see that the um the machine gets smaller it gets more simplified it gets in a lot of ways a lot easier to work on and you can see generation by generation how we continue to improve upon um those technologies you see a larger display and eventually you see us moving into even touch screen displays that's for ease of use the whole reason for going into that is to say the real key here is just to ask yourself how can you leverage technology to save the time of the workers that are there uh that you are able to um to hire and that you have that have stayed in your company how can you utilize their time better because there's nothing that anyone's going to be able to do to put more workers into the market either people are willing to work in manufacturing jobs or they aren't and we aren't going to see a massive shift in the next few years of people who are looking to work in that sector so we have to focus on how we can utilize that technology and when you're looking at a company using marking and coding as our example that is going to help you do that you focus on um the brand and the what that represents so with hitachi's philosophy behind marking and coding they're making products that want that they want to be simple easy to use they want to be efficient and reliable and they also want those products to last a lifetime so you know this is the history of the product um and then that obviously leads us into where we are today so what we're seeing is this trend of um preventative maintenance and machine learning and machines becoming really intelligent and being able to let operators know before they have an issue um it's it's i would say necessary in today's environment not only to just install equipment but you want it fully integrated into the factory floor um you're seeing networking being a standard feature in most coding equipment you're seeing um softwares that are advertising advanced technologies like predictive maintenance and machine learning um so that they can predict when you will have down time however that's not really what i'm proposing as the solution to the labor crisis what i'm proposing is that it's more important to select equipment based on efficiency ease of use reliability so that you're not solving a problem that you haven't run into yet if that makes sense meaning predictive maintenance is great but wouldn't just less maintenance overall be a better solution when you're talking about time saving so if i have to have an operator spend 30 minutes repairing equipment and i know that i'm gonna have to do it in let's say two weeks yes i can add that to a schedule but that takes someone's time to uh plan that shut the line down um get the operator online to repair the equipment and it's actually a much uh better savings of time to focus on equipment that is not designed to have that down time in the first place so to focus on not on machine learning and ai but to focus on reliable efficient and effective equipment to solve the problems so christian you mentioned that we're seeing trends in the market towards automation innovation no preventative or predictive maintenance and you mentioned i noticed that you don't see this as the core of the solution and it's maybe not the avenue to solve the problem to the labor shortage so i'm kind of curious how would you suggest companies use technology to address this issue right so as i alluded to um you can't just add head count and you need to really focus on how you're making each operator's job easier um so the how do you do that how do you make an operator's job easier you need to focus on long-lasting printer technologies and that's going to cut down on operating training you can also add in certain types of automation that are proven technologies that can in some instances replace humans so you can talk about things like vision systems that can detect variations in your parts they can detect misprinted codes things of that nature um so you can talk about really replacing um either people or the time of people with equipment you know i've heard of anecdotally that cij can be a major factor in the downtime of many production facilities and coding off is often a technology that requires daily or weekly intervention um and you've got workers that are focused on that so we want to focus on redeploying those workers into areas where you need them so they're not necessarily focused on cij anymore um you know i've i know of places where it's common for the cij technician to have a dedicated parking spot that they they're at the plant so much that they need to come in and dedicate time to keeping the cij equipment running that's a head count that you can allocate somewhere else um that's so interesting i've never actually heard of that right yeah it's it's not all that uncommon that especially when um factories are planning their downtime um that they'll bring someone in and their their job is specific for just the cij printers and hitachi really has an entirely different philosophy hitachi's philosophy is to build technologies that don't fail um and it may sound like a fantasy right that it just doesn't fail but it's much better to spend the time and invest the research and development from hitachi's perspective to building a robust product that is really designed to last for a long period of time and be able to provide to manufacturing facilities a product that is really not going to go down rather than say test how long it takes for a pump for example let's test how long it takes a pump for it to fail and then every x number of hours we assume that it's going to fail so we'll get somebody in there to fix it um that's one way to look at it but hitachi being focused for the entirety of its um history as a company on high quality and robust solutions that's not the type of philosophy that they take some examples here are i mentioned the pump hitachi doesn't use your traditional pump design they use a diaphragm based pump design so um it is an electrical motor that runs on a cam system which operates diaphragm pumps and so you can see from this illustration in the bottom left that the fluid comes in and out of the diaphragm chamber and you have a flexible membrane that is actually pushing the fluid where it needs to go for a number of reasons that's more efficient the main one uh in terms of longevity and um less downtime is that there are no mechanical parts rubbing against you know one another like in a conventional gear pump where you have the gears the teeth of those gears will rub against each other and over time you get wear and parts break with a membrane design you don't have that mechanical force interacting with um with the fluid or parts interacting with one another there's fewer parts to break and so it's really just a pump that's that's designed not to fail not to fail on any specific integral or fail at all another example here in the center you can see is the center aligned gutter so if you're familiar with cij technology we have a part in the printer it's called the gutter it reflects the fluid as it's being um it requests the food that's not used during printing uh and recirculates it through the system all cij printers operate based on this now many cij technologies traditionally have used a gutter that is aligned to the one side and that is so that they can get the um the drops to actually touch the side of the gutter and they use that uh in the operation of the machine i won't go into too much detail hitachi has designed it differently from the rest of the cij community and designed it with a center-aligned gutter eliminating the need for the fluid to actually touch the gutter the way that it does with a general um edge line uh better i could get into more detail on that but at a high level what this means is they deviated from the rest of the market like they did with the diaphragm pump and went with a design that is novel and built for the purpose of lasting a long time not necessarily for making it less expensive or making it uh easier to manufacture they've really got the customer in mind and the longevity and the ease of use of the product i'm harping on less maintenance and less operator training because you um aren't going to have to change out the equipment that often um and the last point i've got on this slide here is um the dedicated vistometer so i was mentioning the edge-aligned gutter previously part of that is to measure the thickness or the viscosity of the fluid that's the reason that you would do the better this way and hitachi has decided that it's better to not to spare the expense of a dedicated discovery they've added that piece of measurement analytical measurement equipment directly into it and so that means that you're getting an accurate measurement and that's allowed them to make just a higher quality more robust product it's not designed to fail on any interval because it's not designed to fail at all and what that means is you get to keep the equipment for a longer period of time and resulting in less operator training for new operators or even existing operators you don't have a scheduled maintenance program meaning that you're replacing things on an interval you're only replacing things when and if they fail um and your uh all of that is freeing up time for operators and maintenance staff and you know really i want to bring that home as the real reason for the discussion here today if you don't have enough pipe count you need to find a place where you can free up people's time and i think investing in quality equipment is is the way to do that um another product i want to take just a moment to talk about would be our vision system as well i spoke briefly on which is a little bit different of a concept it's still made uh with that same quality in mind um that i was talking about hitachi cij but this is an instance where maybe you can replace um a person's head count all together you can redeploy that person somewhere else in the factory in terms of quality control you don't have to have someone spot checking um to make sure that your codes are good you don't have the potential uh problem of rework if you do have an issue with um date codes not being correct because you can actually check and verify that system so that's another suggestion to see where you might be able to find some time savings you can invest in more reliable and efficient equipment in the hitachi cij and in some cases new technologies all together like vision systems which we do see from time to time in the market but i wouldn't say they're as common when we're talking about marketing and coding a lot of times that's focused on other areas of the manufacturing process so it's just important to bring that up as an idea as it relates to marketing and cutting specifically but when i talk about new technology i also want to talk about the future a little bit so i've talked a lot about solving the labor shortage by investing in new equipment to free up your operators time um down the road right and focusing on equipment that's going to last you five six seven years so you aren't having to think every year or two about i've got new operators i need to train on new equipment i've got this maintenance issue of spending 20 hours a week on cij printer maintenance and so investing in equipment today can help solve that problem in the future because the labor shortage is not something that we see as a short-term dilemma there's not any immediate solution to the the larger problem there so we talk about how can what is within our control to fix it and i really believe that investing in quality reliable equipment is the solution however you want to make sure that equipment is ready for the next steps that your manufacturing and production facility are heading towards so i did mention networking automation things like machine learning and ai those are all coming um you know there's been a term that's been thrown around for a long time industry 4.0 and uh i really do believe that the market will be heading in that direction we'll continue to see a an increase in robotics and increase in automation in general and you want to when you are investing in solutions invest in solutions that are ready for the future so as far as hitachi is concerned you know every piece of hitachi equipment is also designed with that in mind with modern communication protocols with um the the ability to integrate directly into the factory line so that if you were to take our advice and look into investing in new cij equipment to alleviate some of the labor problems that you're seeing today if you invest in that equipment you need to be confident that you won't be reinvesting it in equipment down the road three four five years from now um that really defeats the purpose you want to make sure that the features that you think you may need are also included so um christian we actually have i know we have a couple minutes here um we have a few questions in queue if you don't mind maybe we could open up the floor a little bit to the audience so i see one question here it says these are great points do you have any tips on how we can advocate to upper management for new equipment to help with the labor shortage if they don't want to spend the budget absolutely so what i would suggest is to um to analyze within your own organization exactly how much time is being spent on certain tasks and when you're talking with people in management you know i think they understand very well that time equals money and that especially you know to stay on topic with the labor shortage you may not have the ability to just add head count in order to accomplish your goals increa increase production or increased efficiency so when you sit someone down that's enough for management you say i have three operators one of my operators spends 30 out of his 40 hours per week on cij maintenance that's an entire person's salary almost that 75 of a person's salary um that we're losing out on because this equipment simply isn't working for us and when you turn the argument to that uh it's a lot easier to make that justification for the initial uh investment capital i'm sorry about that um i lost some of the questions here let me get that back up and i think we have a couple more that just came in we'll take two more questions i know we're here running short on time here christian so if you want to rapid fire hit them i have two more the first one is what additional features should manufacturers be looking for to be more future so what you want to look for is something that is able to easily integrate with erp systems and the larger networking infrastructure that's being set out so um you want basic communication protocols a lot of people talk about their own proprietary softwares and their own different suites that they can provide that are going to tie in but you want to talk more about how those are going to tie into the larger production software so talk about communication protocols talk about um basically the ease of integration that's what you want to focus on when you're looking for certain features okay i think one more yep um are there any upgrades or improvements regarding to making logo types on things japan logos yes so logos in particular um one thing about dot matrix printing is that because each dot is placed individually that's where you get your increased speed and flexibility that you're typically looking for with cij and your trade-off is typically resolution so when you're talking about tij in particular and you're talking about logos you have to find a way to either put the dots down more accurately and faster or you have to sacrifice the way that that logo looks and if i understand the question correctly it's how do we get um a better looking logo and maintain the production speeds that you're looking for so what hitachi has done specifically is they have produced an algorithm that is specifically designed in the way that it lays down the drops onto the piece of product in um to lay it in the most efficient way it gets a little bit dense there but basically being electrically charged they can interfere with each other that's how you get that print quality and they've developed an algorithm that the printer runs which lays those in a specific order to get better print quality for logo so that is something that uh hitachi has taken into consideration thank you christian son i feel like this these 30 minutes flew by but we really appreciate your time and your insight today yes thank you and thank you for all of the attendees uh i appreciate the opportunity to share some of my knowledge with you hopefully it was insightful and gave you some ideas on how to tackle the labor shortage so um absolutely thank you and i'd love to join us for the next one and i just wanted to ask the attendees to please keep an eye out for an email we'll share recording of this webinar and as always we'll be creating a webinar a to share and provide tips on all that was discussed today um but before we close out i'd like to share that our next free hitachi webinar will be happening in the spring so please be on the lookout for that as well uh thank you again and remember he touches knowledge is always there to help you succeed my name is tina ada and thank you

2022-02-02 20:09

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