Automation Essential To Sustainable Success

By Steven Van Geel, Sales Director China at TOMRA Sorting Food

Continued advances in automation and robotics are making the global food manufacturing and processing industries safer, more efficient and able to deliver higher profits.

We believe that these improvements are not only necessary to boost yield, but also inevitable as automation and robotics continue to evolve.

Research by Grant Thornton validates this claim. The international business consultancy’s recent global survey of 2,751 executives in 36 economies shows that manufacturing businesses across the world will be replacing more than five per cent of their workforce with robots in the near future.

However, when this does happen, more than half of the surveyed companies plan to redeploy affected staff. Of those companies that keep staff, 28 per cent would expect existing employees to control the machines that replace them.