Auxiliary equipment makers line up future work while noting: ‘Robots didn't get the virus'

Auxiliary equipment manufacturers automate clean rooms to make critical medical devices, supply robots to package products, develop scanners for reverse engineering, and now they have a chance to play a greater role in the rebuilding of U.S. infrastructure.

Adam Grier, president of radar sensor technology producer Inoex LLC, is optimistic about President Joe Biden's $2 trillion American Jobs Plan to overhaul the economy while spending on roads, bridges, broadband, the electric grid, advanced manufacturing and more. The plan, which would be offset by corporate tax increases, calls for investing $111 billion in water infrastructure with $45 billion to be set aside to make sure no child has to drink water from a lead pipe, which can slow their development and cause behavioral and other problems.

Grier is paying particular attention to plans to replace 100 percent of the nation's lead pipes and service lines. Lancaster, Pa.-based Inoex developed radar sensor technology for contact-free measurement of the diameter and wall thickness of plastic pipe as it is being extruded. The Warp product portfolio is suitable for nylon, PVC, polyethylene and polypropylene pipe. Several Inoex customers are using the Warp technology on PVC and PE pipes that move water for municipalities. The Biden plan will bode well for modernizing the nation's aging, leaking, corroding delivery system for drinking water, Grier said.

"This will create huge demand for both PE and PVC municipal water pipes, which I believe is a good thing, not only for pipe manufacturers, but it's actually a great thing for our nation because it will improve the quality of the water we all drink by eliminating infiltration that occurs in old pipe systems," Grier said in an email.

Replacing the crumbling pipe infrastructure also will improve the efficiency of the water distribution systems by improving pump station efficiency and eliminating leaks that cause water utilities to lose millions of gallons each month, Grier said. A half-inch leak can waste more than 20 million gallons of clean water in a year, he added.

"Think about how much clean drinking water is wasted each year by our older cities," Grier said.

Auxiliary equipment providers are optimistic about the roles robots are playing at manufacturing plants.

"Processors saw robots didn't get the virus, nor exposures and shelter-in-place," David Preusse, president of Wittmann Battenfeld Inc. in Torrington, Conn., said in an email.

Demand for press-side automation has increased on top of a higher rate of sales for pick-and-place robots, Preusse said. Now the company is focused on designing more flexible systems, he added.

"Molding applications in medical, packaging, white goods, automotive, consumer products — all are keeping our Applications Engineering Group busy quoting, selling, making systems, including added-value steps in the molding work cell," Preusse said. "We're seeing new types of inserts molders want to place in the mold, or multicomponent molding cells."

Demand is up for turnkey work cells that use 4.0 integration with the injection molding machine, mold, robot, automation and auxiliary equipment. The company is doing the debugging tests in Connecticut for more seamless customer installations in the field.

At Sepro Group, demand has increased for automation in clean rooms and sensitive production environments from the medical and pharmaceutical markets. The company launched a new Med Series of three-, five- and six-axis robots based on sales of 1,500 automation units for molding machines in ISO 7 and 8 clean rooms.

"Business in the last half of 2020 was very robust, and that trend is continuing in 2021," Jim Healy, Sepro's vice president of sales and marketing, said in an email.

A year ago, however, businesses were scrambling to find a new normal. Equipment sales that began strong in the first quarter of 2020 had plunged. The high rate of COVID-19 infections sweeping China then Europe and the United States brought the world to a standstill. "When March Madness was canceled and our nation realized we faced an epic pandemic, sales tanked for three months," Preusse said.

At Sepro, offices were mostly shut down, customers didn't allow visitors into their plants and most of the staff worked from home, Raul Scheller, Sepro's managing director of North America, said in an email.

"A skeleton staff maintained Sepro's service hotline and parts operations for about 60 days," Scheller said. "A lot of business in the late spring and early summer was conducted remotely, mainly via telephone."

Companies adjusted business practices and collaborated in new ways, according to Steve Young, owner of laser measurement specialist Exact Metrology Inc. "Learning to adapt as technology continues to advance has been a friend rather than a foe to us during the pandemic," Young said in an email.

Software updates met many challenges for Exact Metrology, he added. "We have the ability to share data with our customers, where they have the opportunity to view it from the comfort of their own device," Young said. "Not only does this allow for a more streamlined, efficient way of communicating about data in the midst of a pandemic, but also pushes the creative boundaries for more technological advances to come."

Within a couple months of the pandemic being declared, Sepro "got back more or less to business as usual," Scheller said.

"We have an incredible team — sales, service, engineering, operations and administrative staff — who stayed optimistic from the beginning and showed fantastic creativity in maintaining a high level of service to customers, while also acting responsibly during the pandemic." Scheller said.

By the end of last summer, production in Sepro's factory in La Roche-sur-Yon, France, had returned to full production.

"As travel restrictions have eased, U.S. sales and service personnel are back on the road, visiting customers when possible, while taking all the proper precautions," Scheller said.

Around June 2020, Wittmann Battenfeld also experienced an uptick in sales.

"We felt a sharp and relentless increase in monthly robot business for the rest of the year, higher than previous levels capacity," Preusse said. "We saw rebounds in our injection molding machines and material handling systems. Mostly, our orders were driven toward personal protective equipment and medical-related molding projects to support the pandemic fight."

The orders were filled amid new constraints. Preusse said Wittmann Battenfeld, its customers and their supply chains adopted safety protocols that caused workforce shortages. Logistics freight lines were imbalanced and delayed. Field sales couldn't get appointments. "Travel was mostly only field service most often by car," Preusse said.

Still, business was successfully conducted.

"Due to the surge in the second half of 2020 and sharing more of our U.S. manufacturing with Austrian production capacity, we finished up over 2019 revenues," Preusse said.

Now vaccine rollouts are happening around the world. Some health and safety restrictions are loosening for people who have been immunized.

"We are already now gaining more face-to-face meetings and we believe business can only do so well in a virtual space," Preusse said. "We see shows with equipment innovations, technical conferences and physical meetings coming back and necessary."

Catherine Kavanaugh is a Plastics News staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @CatherineKav.