PPB August 2018

by Jen Alexander TECH TALK eHumanTouch Despite the growing use of robotics, employees continue to ll crucial gaps in business automation. Some days we just want to live in George Jetson’s world, where robots do everything for us. Other days we wish we were on Walden Pond, living off the land in rough splendor. Businesses are seeking a balance between automating business processes and maintaining a strong human component to work. Even futurist Elon Musk sees the value in human performance. While the Silicon Valley tech giant makes a living sending unmanned rockets into space and pursuing driverless automobile technology, he acknowledges that there are some things robots just can’t do as well as people—which is why he removed robots from portions of Tesla production this year. At Cimpress, parent company of industry distributor Vistaprint, automation is balanced with human intervention according to a few basic principles. First, deciding when and where to apply automation in its production process is based on cost, safety, operational ef ciency and customer satisfaction. Second, Cimpress believes that human participation guarantees the application and execution of common sense, big-picture analysis and creativity in processes. In the Vistaprint plant in Ontario, Canada, for example, teams prepare and ship 60,000 orders on an average day. This number skyrockets to more than 100,000 during peak periods. While automation plays key roles throughout the plant and enables rapid scaling to meet a surge in customer demand, the more than 1,000-member staff also plays a critical role in the creation of the end product. Areas where human workers outperform robots include managing multiple machines, switching jobs and performing quality checks, and areas where Vistaprint has found automation most helpful are boxing business cards and moving single product orders from product cell to logistics or shipping. 60 | AUGUST 2018 | THINK