By Mikko Urho, CEO, Visual Components
Supply chain disruptions from the pandemic, together with heightened geopolitical tensions, kickstarted a trend for reshoring, where manufacturers bring their operations back to the country or region of origin. In the subsequent years, we’ve witnessed organisations continue this trend as they look to reduce global supply chain dependency and ensure any future disruptions can be better dealt with. Operations that are physically closer to the end consumer also mean shorter physical distances for products to travel, resulting in lower costs and more streamlined and sustainable operations from reduced carbon emissions.
Manufacturers are also looking to streamline their operations with new technology deployments in 2025. Automation is set to increase in the sector as more robots are installed globally in factory floor operations. These solutions are the key to repeatable, quick and accurate processes, with a level of consistency that humans struggle to replicate. Adopters of robotic deployments can also avoid any potential errors made by human workers.
With China accounting for 52% of robot installations worldwide in 2022, it’s likely that it will continue to lead the way in factory automation, but regions such as Europe, Japan and South Korea will invest heavily as well. Alongside this greater reliance on robots in the coming years will be a need to adopt robot offline programming (OLP) technology. OLP enables manufacturers to create a highly accurate digital replica of the real robot and its accompanying work cell, rapidly speeding up the programming time of a new deployment and preventing any production delays.
