Combating the skills shortage in Europe through the robot revolution

For sheet met­al bend­ing, a Lithuan­ian-led part­ner­ship has devel­oped the world’s first stan­dard­ized robot­ic cell — an inno­va­tion that adds flex­i­bil­i­ty to man­u­fac­tur­ing and could be the key to over­com­ing the short­age of skilled work­ers in the sheet met­al indus­try in Ger­many and across Europe.

Bent sheet met­al parts are need­ed every­where — but cur­rent man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es use expen­sive sin­gle-pur­pose machines that can­not be adapt­ed to chang­ing require­ments. The advan­tage of the RoboBend is that it can be pro­grammed to pro­duce a wide range of prod­ucts. The robot can be installed in exist­ing pro­duc­tion lines and is com­pat­i­ble with all exist­ing press brakes. The bend­ing time depends on the dif­fi­cul­ty of the part to be pro­duced and ranges from one minute for sim­ple parts to 2–3 min­utes for more demand­ing parts.

History of the innovation

“The idea start­ed in 2017, when one of Fac­to­botics’ cus­tomers asked for a cus­tomized robot­ic solu­tion for sheet met­al bend­ing. We soon real­ized that many oth­er com­pa­nies had a sim­i­lar prob­lem. The answer was a stan­dard­ized robot — so we found­ed RoboBend. So the robot­ic solu­tion came out of the col­lab­o­ra­tion with Fac­to­botics, but Robobend is now an inde­pen­dent company.”

- Thomas Ron­lev, CEO and co-founder

Since then, the robot man­u­fac­tur­er has received orders from the auto­mo­tive, con­struc­tion, food and oth­er indus­tries. Ini­tial­ly focused on the Dan­ish mar­ket, RoboBend has also attract­ed inter­est in Lithua­nia, where Fac­to­botics is based. Now RoboBend is ready to expand its oper­a­tions and focus on new export mar­kets. Start­ing in 2022, the com­pa­ny is tar­get­ing cus­tomers through­out North­ern Europe — espe­cial­ly in Germany.

Great opportunity

With 150,000 to 200,000 press brakes cur­rent­ly in oper­a­tion, Ger­many is a huge mar­ket for RoboBend, which has already received inquiries from Ger­man com­pa­nies and dis­trib­u­tors. “Ger­many is cru­cial for us because it has a big lead in man­u­fac­tur­ing — and a big inter­est in keep­ing it,” Ron­lev explains. “Ger­man com­pa­nies are rely­ing on robo­t­i­za­tion to main­tain their lead­er­ship posi­tion because it’s get­ting hard­er to find skilled workers.”

Indeed, skilled labor is a major prob­lem across Europe. The Euro­pean Com­mis­sion’s Skills Panora­ma por­tal pre­dicts 2.7 mil­lion unfilled met­al engi­neer­ing jobs in the EU by 2030. “Skilled work­ers are crit­i­cal to the suc­cess of man­u­fac­tur­ing — but the com­ing gen­er­a­tions are choos­ing oth­er pro­fes­sions. That’s why robots are the solu­tion,” says Ronlev.

Justi­nas Katkus, co-founder and head of prod­uct design at Fac­to­botics, points out that automa­tion is not a threat to jobs, but increas­es the val­ue of skilled labor, “Robots help pre­serve jobs, not take them away. Thanks to robots, fac­to­ries can main­tain the same or high­er capac­i­ty. And that means the mon­ey stays in Europe — in the form of jobs, wages, sup­ply chains and invest­ment. Glob­al­ly, the trend is toward less repet­i­tive work,” he adds. “Every­one wants to move peo­ple up the val­ue chain.”

With the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic dis­rupt­ing glob­al sup­ply chains, man­u­fac­tur­ers are also real­iz­ing they can no longer rely on sup­pli­ers in far-flung loca­tions like Chi­na. As robot­ic solu­tions become more pow­er­ful, cheap­er and eas­i­er to imple­ment, com­pa­nies are revers­ing the process of off­shoring to move pro­duc­tion clos­er to home — help­ing to make their sup­ply chains more resilient.

The future of robotics

Robot­ics has advanced rapid­ly in recent years. Next-gen­er­a­tion robots like RoboBend are smarter and eas­i­er to pro­gram and oper­ate, with intu­itive, user-friend­ly inter­faces. They can be eas­i­ly inte­grat­ed into exist­ing pro­duc­tion process­es with­out hav­ing to redesign the entire pro­duc­tion line.

In addi­tion, robo­t­i­za­tion no longer requires the same high ini­tial invest­ment — the increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar Robots as a Ser­vice (RaaS) busi­ness mod­el allows com­pa­nies to lease rather than buy robots, mak­ing robots an attrac­tive option even for small­er com­pa­nies with low volumes.