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Minority Engineer Magazine, launched in 1979, is a career- guidance and recruitment magazine offered at no charge to qualified engineering or computer-science students and professionals who are African-American, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American. Minority Engineer presents career strategies for readers to assimilate into a diversified job marketplace.

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 Cobotics Could Offer Competitive Advantage to MBEs

 
 
What happens when people and robots collaborate? And what are the implications cobotics - collaborative robotics - might have on manufacturing?
Those questions and more artificial intelligence-related queries were discussed at the Diverse Manufacturing Supply Chain Alliance conference. It was held in April in Cambridge, MA.
“The artificial intelligence component, that’s probably been in the works for about a decade. But it’s here,” says Joann Hill, chief of the office of business development for the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), in a blog post about this conference, mbda.gov/news/blog/2018/05/robots-ai-and-more-diverse-manufacturing-supply-chain-alliance-conference.
“It’s like the sleeping giant; the rumbling below the surface has erupted,” she adds.
Hill, who represented MBDA at the two-day conference and touted the agency’s advanced manufacturing footprint nationally, listened intently to panels including AI Is Not Just a Buzzword - 5 Ways Artificial Intelligence is Already Changing the Game and The Robots Are Coming: Empowering People Through Automation.
It reminded her of a trip she took to Detroit, MI earlier this year when she visited a few automotive manufacturing plants.
After attending the conference and hearing the topics, Hill feels that some of those MBDA clients would be well-served by hopping aboard the cobotics bandwagon, leaning out their supply chains from end to end with the help of this emerging technology.
“There have been incremental things [in supply chain management] that have come along in the past 10 years, but nothing quite as revolutionary,” Hill points out in that post.
That evolution can be seen in almost all facets of supply chain management. The AI Is Not Just a Buzzword panel noted that artificial intelligence can be leveraged to “provide visibility of tracking, monitoring and analyzing all aspects of both supplier and customer performance in supply chains.”
AI, coupled with improved data analytics, has already spurred more integration of platforms, which, in turn, leads to greater efficiencies along the supply chain.
The Robots Are Coming panel used Locus Robotics’ products to demonstrate how warehouse operations can be optimized via the implementation of autonomous mobile robots.
Using robotics and cobotics are also essential to more effectively responding to e-commerce volume growth and seasonal peaks in business.
The presentation showed how LocusBots operated safety alongside real people, which might understandably give some workers pause.
“It’s going to be a different skill set that minority-owned firms require of people in the future,” Hill notes.
“Businesses will still need people, but some things we used to do that a robot can do, the robot will do them. I think some of the questions businesses will ask are, ‘How do we train our employees to work on this computer? How do we make sure our employees gain the necessary skills to become computer programmers or coders or know how to write programming that can tell this robot what we want it to do?’”
She continues: “This is really going to be the key piece of the future with regard to the opportunity and talent and skills that are highly sought after. Business owners must embrace this change.”
From the perspective of Washington, DC-headquartered MBDA, mbda.gov, the four advanced manufacturing centers in Atlanta, GA, Baltimore, MD, Detroit, MI and San Antonio, TX, and minority business enterprises (MBEs) will work closely together to embrace the changes in the industry as a competitive advantage.
 
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