Todd Honeyville is an electrical engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing automation and robotics. He founded Lion Inc., a systems integration company that designs and builds automated solutions for manufacturers ranging from machine shops to large-scale production facilities.

Nate Wheeler is the host of the popular Manufacturing Insiders podcast. He also owns weCreate, a nationally recognized marketing agency that helps manufacturers grow, save money, and become more efficient.

In this episode of Manufacturing Insiders, Todd Honeyville breaks down the real economics behind manufacturing automation and reveals exactly when robotics investments pay off. He shares his proven framework for determining which operations are prime candidates for automation, using the high volume/low complexity rule that has guided successful implementations across hundreds of projects. Todd also explores how automation is becoming the answer to persistent labor shortages while improving working conditions for employees.

Manufacturing leaders will discover practical payback calculations, learn about the difference between hard and flexible automation, and understand how recent advances in 3D vision systems are opening new possibilities for robotic applications. Todd provides specific examples from machine shops to palletizing operations that demonstrate how manufacturers are achieving 1-3 year paybacks while solving staffing challenges that have plagued the industry for years.

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Nate (00:01.207): Welcome to Manufacturing Insiders. I have a guest who has a lot of knowledge that a lot of manufacturers could use today. He is really the expert in manufacturing automation robotics. He has over 20 years of experience in the manufacturing space. Todd Honeyville, welcome to Manufacturing Insiders.

Todd Honeyville (00:20.782): How are you?

Nate (00:22.519): I’m doing well. So I thought it’d be interesting for us to have this conversation because I work with a lot of manufacturers, mostly on the marketing side, but we have a lot of conversations just about improving efficiency. How are we going to deal with tariffs? How are we going to actually fill all the positions that will be needed if we move manufacturing back to the U.S.?

And I think automation has a big part in that. So I just want to pick your brain today about where it has an application? What type of company should be thinking about automation and robotics and what kind of company shouldn’t be thinking about it? So looking forward to picking your brain on this. Just give us a little bit of a background on how you got to where you are.

Todd Honeyville (01:09.166): Sure. So I’ve spent my whole career in automation. It’s actually since the mid 90s, I went out into the market or into the field. I’m an electrical engineer.

And then I initially started working in the automation space. I started as a service technician in the robotics industry. I worked for FANUC Robotics. And then worked for a number of different integrators and machine builders.

And in the end, I started my own company. So that’s what we do is we do systems integration machine building. And we do systems for manufacturers. So I’m in manufacturing plants often, and I see what they’re doing. And it’s really different kinds of manufacturing, different levels or sizes of companies.

Todd Honeyville (02:07.04): If you want to talk about who benefits from automation, I would say the company that has a high volume and a low complexity of parts. Let’s say you’re a machine shop. It’s an easy one. So you make a gear, let’s say. One of your products is a gear.

You’re selling it to some customer and you make, let’s say you make 10,000 of them a day, the same part over and over and over. You just continually load the machine and unload the machine. It’s the same part, just running all the time. That’s an amazing opportunity for automation.

Complexity is really low and your volume is high. So that means that you’re making good money and it’s easy. So your operator does the same thing over and over he probably got ergonomic issues. So there’s an ergonomic win.

Generally depends on how big the part is and how heavy it is, but even little parts repetitive stress or repetitive motions cause problems for operators. A robot does that great. So you can buy a piece of flexible automation, which has another kind of a distinction between automation types. We call them hard automation and flexible automation.

So a robot would be a piece of flexible automation that you could repurpose if your job changed. For example, a machine shop loses that order. And now you have this piece of automation that has no job.

Todd Honeyville (04:02.21): So the sales guy sells a different operation to another customer. Like GM buys this product from us and they’ve now deprecated the car. But the sales guy gets in on the new car, so he gets the new product, but it’s different than the old product. So a piece of hard automation, which was tailored specifically to the job, now is generally trash.

Maybe there’s some components that you can reuse, but not usually, and it’s usually not very cost effective. So a piece of flexible automation like a robot then can be repurposed to the new job. Maybe all you have to do is change the tool. Maybe the tool even works because it’s just a gripper that moves.

Those are things that you would consider when you’re doing this stuff, but in terms of jobs that are well suited for automation it’s like a gradient. So at one end you have the high volume, low complexity. At the other end, you have low volume, high complexity.

Todd Honeyville (05:00.566): And those two variables, somewhere in the middle, there’s a line where it doesn’t become cost effective anymore. And it’s really dependent on your metrics of cost effectiveness. Like how many operators can you repurpose.

In this world right now that we live in, generally nobody’s getting replaced. They have cost gains through attrition. You put in a piece of automation, somebody quits, you just don’t rehire for that position. But almost nobody buys automation and then lets go operators.

That just doesn’t happen. There aren’t that many operators. So every factory I go to is shorthanded. When they put in automation, nobody’s getting laid off. I mean, that’s my experience.

Todd Honeyville (06:05.698): So anyway, there’s some line where the cost of the automation doesn’t make sense anymore. And it’s down on the other side of the spectrum, where the complexity is high or the volume is too low. So if you make one part every now and then, like a job shop that makes custom parts for people, it is not a good fit for automation. High complexity, low volume.

Nate (06:37.325): Yeah, I was just going to say, with that example, so you got the machine shop that’s making this one gear, and they’re making 500,000 units a year. What solution do they need? How are you going to analyze the cost-benefit scenario?

Is it primarily going to be a robot that’s loading the material into the machine, then removing the finished parts, and then placing it on a conveyor, or is there kind of robotics along the line? So then there’s a robot that’s putting these in packages and palletizing.

Todd Honeyville (07:25.166): So it’s really like, you have to look at the operation. So what’s the operator doing? How many operators are you talking about? So at a high volume operation, there’s probably an assembly line kind of thing happening already.

Like if it’s a high volume operation, that means that somebody’s decanting blanks from a bin or something like that. Putting them on a conveyor maybe. Another operator is loading and unloading a machine and then another operator is maybe putting them in a box and then maybe there’s a logistics guy running around with a forklift to pick up the box when it’s full, take it away and stretch it.

So on a high volume operation, there’s a lot of opportunity to automate each step of the way. And sometimes we can use the same automation to combine more than one operation which is a big win.

Todd Honeyville (08:24.906): If a guy fully loaded costs, let’s say, $60,000, and it’s a two shift operation, you got $120,000 in his job per year. And if his job is to load and unload and the complexity is small, that’s an easy one. Because I can put in one cell like a robot that interfaces with the machine that loads and unloads for maybe $150,000.

And so the payback on that, if you’re a two shift operation is really fast. It’s a year and a little bit. Even a one shift operation, especially if you’re trying to meet demand with overtime.

Todd Honeyville (09:22.528): That’s also a no-brainer. Maybe that’s a two-year payback. At the big companies, two-year payback is kind of industry standard. The smaller companies, they can see the future a little bit better, I think, in their payback number. They’ll let the payback go a little bit longer.

But if you think about it, as a privately-owned small manufacturer, you’re looking at things in a way that maybe like me and you would look at buying an investment. If I buy a personal investment, my payback is probably gonna be like 10 years, maybe 20 years. So the small manufacturing guy can see maybe three to five year payback or something like that as good. But the large companies are always super aggressive because their shareholders need to see quarterly gains.

Nate (10:21.133): So let’s say that this machine shop now has three different gears that they manufacture and each one of them has a little bit of a different processing situation. How easy is it to program that solution to switch between those three operations? Is that possible?

Todd Honeyville (10:49.804): Yeah, so when I say complexity, what I’m referring to is maybe SKUs or however you want to quantify a part number. So the more part numbers, the more problematic the automation can become. And it really depends on the actual physical change in the part, too, or if the operations change substantially.

In a machining center, if it’s simply just load and unload operation in a machining center, then the complexity at that side of it doesn’t matter so much. Because we can interface to a machine and we can call a different program, whatever. That’s not a big deal. And if the load unload is the same, meaning maybe it’s chucked or something like that and it’s always chucked the same, it doesn’t matter.

Or if the fixture is always the same and you put the part in the same way every time it doesn’t matter. How you pick and how you can grab the part is what matters. So if the part size changes drastically that can be a problem or if the part shape changes drastically or if for some reason you can’t touch a surface or things like that. Those are the things that are gonna make it more complicated.

Todd Honeyville (13:08.174): Here I can give you an example. So we did a project for a company loading and unloading a machine called a time saver. Some people probably know what that is. It’s basically a finish grinder. It’s just a big machine that you feed sheet metal parts or plate parts through.

And it’ll go through the machine and it grinds, surface grinds the top lightly. Just gets rid of all the imperfections on the top and the bottom and then comes out the other side. So this company was using that machine manually with sheet metal. The logistics guy would bring over a skid of 600 parts and they’d be sheet metal parts and the guy would go pick one up feed it through the machine and then on the other side another guy would pick it and put it on the skid so you’d have to have two guys.

All they were doing all day long was feeding parts through the machine. The issue with the project was that they had 300 SKUs, something like that. Which wouldn’t be a problem if let’s say the sheets were all the same size or similar in size.

But not only did they vary widely in size, like from five feet long and two feet wide to like little pieces that were only like six by six inches. And then they had cutouts in them. Some of them were different, like all kinds of wildly different parts. They were all like 20 gauge sheet metal. So that wasn’t a problem. The issue was that they were totally different.

Todd Honeyville (13:36.716): And they were stainless. So they were non-ferrous. You couldn’t use a magnet gripper. So you couldn’t use magnets. You had to use suction to pick them. And there was still a good possibility. We did this project. It was successful. So this is still possible. This is just a hard one. We put two robots in, one on each side.

Nate (14:11.839): Non-magnetic. Yep, because that’s what was in my head. Magnetic.

Todd Honeyville (14:36.098): One to pick and feed the parts and one to pick and place the parts. The hard part was how do you pick the part and then how do you pick it on the other side again? Because the part goes through the machine and now we don’t know the orientation again. The first robot has to figure out what part it is and orient it, put it in the machine. And then the orientation’s lost through the machine.

So then the second robot has to figure out what the orientation is and then reorient it to stack it correctly. So basically what we did was we put a vision system over both sides and identified all the different parts, found the corners, found the proper pick location, then did the pick in place. And then on the other side, we had to do the same thing, basically. But you already knew what part it was, at least on the other side.

And they didn’t want to, which was an extra piece of trouble, they didn’t want the operator to have to select the part. They wanted the system to just figure it out. So that’s hard. But in the end, this is all doable. The trick is the reason that it was justifiable was because they had two operators on two shifts though. So it was a pretty big pool of money that they started with.

We ended up using used robots so that they saved a lot of money on mechanism cost. And it’s an ergonomic issue as well. They put in lift tables. So you put the skid and the parts on a lift table in their self-adjusting, self-aligning lift tables. So they theoretically are always at the right height. But there’s still a guy that has to do this all day long. And so there’s ergonomic issues, there’s workman’s comp claims, which is all numbers that you can use for justification.

Nate (16:41.665): And plus what we’ve talked about where it’s not even just the amount that you would save on not having that employee, but in most cases it’s that they can’t find the employee to do the job in the first place.

Todd Honeyville (16:56.77): Right. Yeah. Another factory we did business with, there were probably 30% down in employees every day. Guys would call off, no show, no call no shows all the time. And it’s because the operations aren’t enjoyable for anybody. I mean, one of the operations we replaced with a palletizer was three guys and we put in one robot to do the job of three guys.

The 25 pound box they had to pick up so they had to pick up this 25 pound box and put it on a pallet. And then there were 13 of them on a layer seven layers high. So whatever that comes to, 80 something like that. Whatever it is, a lot. So they had to do that but it actually doesn’t matter how many.

It matters that every 20 seconds, another box had to be placed on the skid for the whole shift. And these plants aren’t air conditioned. This happened to be in the south. So it was like 100 degrees and 100% humidity in the summertime. And these guys are doing this all day long. So it’s really difficult.

Nate (18:02.455): Yeah. What a job.

Todd Honeyville (18:23.054): Even to justify humanitarianism or whatever you want to call it. It’s inhuman to even ask these people to do it. But I don’t know. I had some trouble early in my career with the idea of replacing people’s jobs with mechanisms. I thought that it was maybe the wrong thing to do. But at some point, I realized that people shouldn’t be doing these jobs. These are horrible jobs.

There are a lot of other jobs and there really are a lot of jobs available. I know that the job numbers say that they’re like, what, I don’t remember what it is. I don’t know what it is. Do you know what it is right now?

Nate (19:08.077): I don’t, but I know what you’re saying and a lot of times they’re manipulating the numbers to tell whatever story they want.

Todd Honeyville (19:18.668): Right. Yeah, they do that for sure. But there are a lot of jobs out there. Like when I look around, there are jobs and the jobs are better than those jobs. Don’t get me wrong. I think manufacturing jobs are good. I actually just watched a video. My son sent me a video. The BMW plant was like a walk through the BMW plant and the guy was talking about how many employees they had still.

So this plant was a full manufacturing plant for BMWs. I don’t remember what car they made, they still had, I think, 2,500 employees, and it’s a fully automated plant. So it’s not like these jobs all disappear. There’s still a lot of jobs, but they’re the ones that don’t have ergonomic issues and aren’t impossible to do all day long. So I just feel like that’s the right direction.

Todd Honeyville (20:15.458): That’s the direction we have to go anyway, especially if manufacturing moves back to the US like it looks like it’s going to do. We just won’t have the employee base that we need to support it. We have to automate these jobs.

Nate (20:27.691): Yep. And that’s the big concern. In theory, great. Let’s boost US manufacturing. If you can do it without overtaxing the already huge shortage of labor out there, that would be the key. So how much of…

I would assume that there’s situations where you’re kind of providing consultation inside of a facility to say, okay, you guys have a lot of variability in your process right now, but if we can do things like X, Y, or Z, now we can apply a robotic solution to it.

Todd Honeyville (21:09.198): Sure. I mean, generally, we do a lot of business with large corporations. They’re the ones that buy the most automation. They’re the ones that understand it too. So there’s another piece of this that people should understand, and that’s that you have to manage the automation after it’s installed. You need to have somebody on staff.

In a large factory, there are maintenance guys. If they’ve never had automation before, it’s still like a learning curve or maybe they have to hire some new people, but there always needs to be people to support the automation. Technical people that need to support automation. If I put a robot into a factory, there needs to be somebody at least that I can train to be able to handle basic stuff.

You don’t need to have a programmer on staff and I don’t want to make it sound like you need to have a hundred and fifty thousand dollar guy you don’t. A lot of times we can train one of the operators that has some extra go-getter in them. And so we’ll train those guys to be like specialists or something like this. And now maybe they’ll end up with an extra couple of dollars an hour because they can handle some triage, some troubleshooting of the machine that the other guys can’t.

But maintenance guys are kind of who usually it’s in their purview generally. So there will be a problem in all systems. Everything breaks. So if you’re a manufacturer, you can’t generally wait. I mean, it depends on what kind of manufacturing you’re in, but generally you can’t wait two weeks for a service guy to show up or something. You have to run.

Todd Honeyville (23:36.206): Generally, you need somebody on staff who can handle at least something. I would say that the small manufacturers that we do business with, they usually have an owner or somebody like that who’s interested in technology already. So when we put a piece of equipment in, they take some ownership of it. Or maybe a bigger place, maybe like a 10 to $20 million factory, then they probably have some level of maintenance that we can teach to be these guys.

And then the bigger factories like the guys that do 100, 200, 500 million a year or whatever, those guys have fully dedicated technicians generally. And they have lots of automation already, so they understand everything.

I just wanted to say that because if you’re walking in thinking, oh, I have one machine, but we’ve sold a really great product to somebody like an injection molder. Like there are a lot of little injection molders around that do like key chains or whatever and they sell thousands and thousands of key chains and it’s a great opportunity to automate but it’s two guys in a garage that are doing it.

So without some kind of technical buy-in by those guys then it’ll be difficult to manage long-term.

Nate (24:34.347): Right. Yeah, that does make sense. So yeah, my original question was kind of helping companies formulate an idea of where automation could occur and maybe having to change their order of operation or change something about the process in order to accomplish that.

Todd Honeyville (24:59.222): Okay, yeah, so actually we do that quite a lot. The problem is it makes the sales cycle really long for us. Because that means that there’s no project today, but I mean, that’s our problem, not your problem kind of thing. So we’ll go into a factory and look at their operations. A lot of times when somebody’s calling about automation, they have historically done a lot of manual processes and they’re looking at these manual processes and thinking that they could maybe do something.

And then we go look at them and it’s like well, you know really you… Because it is a manual process, if you have a lot of operators you can do a lot of strange things. You can have guys doing six jobs. And I don’t mean if their load is low.

So you look at a guy who’s running a press, let’s say. And his press is running at one stroke a minute because your volume is at that level. So he’s making some part and it runs, it’s two hands stroked. So it’s manually stroked. So he picks up a blank, loads the press, strokes it.

And then takes the part back out, puts it on a skid, picks up another part, puts it in the press, strokes it. So that’s a slow operation because it’s driven by the demand for the part or the sales or whatever. Maybe he even has enough time because the requirement was that he needs to make 500 parts a day and he can do one a minute and I don’t know what the numbers come out to but he has extra time.

Todd Honeyville (27:15.982): He can also maybe handle his skid. He can take the skid when it’s finished, go stretch, wrap it, put it wherever in the warehouse or whatever, and then get a new skid, put it there and then start working again. So he’s now doing more than one job. And so if you look at the factory and you have all of these guys doing multiple jobs, I guess my point is that if you’re doing manual operations, a human can do lots of different things.

So a human can be split, his job can be split with other humans in different ways than machines can. So you have to basically rebalance the human tasks if you want to automate. So maybe you have to combine, instead of combining logistics and operations in one human, you have to just combine two different operations and then give the logistics back to the guys. Something like that. So that happens a lot.

Nate (27:49.293): Right. Yep. No, that makes a lot of sense. So what’s the kind of breakdown of the customers that you have? You said you typically work with larger companies. Is there a percentage of 10, 15, 20 guys shops that you work with too?

Todd Honeyville (28:14.798): That’s a small shop. Generally those guys aren’t looking for automation. I don’t know what the future holds. There’s a potential. Automation is getting cheaper. I don’t know how everything’s gonna play out in the end, but automation is becoming more accessible, I’d say.

And more people are generally more technologically savvy now. So it seems like maybe automation will move down in the plant hierarchy or the manufacturing hierarchy, whatever you wanna say. But generally, it’s been large corporations that buy this stuff. So that’s the market that we’ve lived in most of the time.

We do have some smaller manufacturers, but when I say that, generally it’s like 200 employees. I can’t think off the top of my head if we’ve done anything like 50 employees or not. It’s just that those guys generally don’t wanna spend.

That’s another problem is you have to spend money to get into it. So yes, the payback could be maybe only two to three years, but it’s $150,000 today. So can you take $150,000 and put it into a capital investment for the plant? Maybe those guys could borrow the money and it wouldn’t be as big a deal, but I can see a smaller corporation, like somebody who does ~$3 million a year in gross revenue. I would think it would be like an ask, a pretty big ask to invest 150K into a machine, you know, unless they financed it.

Todd Honeyville (30:28.526): I don’t know, $3 million a year in gross revenue. I would think it would be like a pretty big ask to invest 150K into a machine, unless they financed it. So generally like the bigger guys who buy equipment. I don’t think that that’s permanent though. I actually have been kicking this around and I’ve been talking to some people about it.

There’s an idea that I had that maybe, I mean, there are right now leasing companies that will buy things like automation or equipment and lease it to the manufacturer. Which I think is an interesting idea. So instead of having to front $150,000, they can just lease it from this leasing company who bought it. But we’ve been floating the idea here about maybe doing a subscription, rental, whatever you want to call it.

So building a machine, giving it to the customer for a nominal charge, down payment kind of charge, and then charging them, let’s call it even a security deposit, and then charging them by usage or by hourly.

Todd Honeyville (31:27.502): Which I think is an interesting concept and I don’t know if anybody’s doing it yet, but if you looked at your operation like right now you’re paying your guy $23 an hour plus benefits or whatever it is. So you’re all in at $27 an hour and you can get a piece of equipment to come in here and pay $25 an hour for that piece of equipment, why wouldn’t you do it? And it does the operation that you need it to do. Why wouldn’t you do it?

Nate (32:05.099): Yeah, that’s a really cool concept. And that’s kind of the way that I picture the future of robotics. And you can totally correct and shoot down my idea. But I picture these robots almost as an apprentice.

And so when you have that guy, you’re not talking like a super complex engineering job. You’re talking about the guy that’s splitting his time between offloading those parts from the press, going back, getting a pallet, those types of things that you were talking about. Having a humanoid robot that could follow that guy around for a couple of days and see exactly what he does. It’s the same thing every day, and then essentially learning what the scenario is and then just doing it. That’s what I would see the future as.

Todd Honeyville (33:01.678): Well, that’s a way out. We’re not there yet. Have you looked at our website? You can look at www.lioninc.us.

But what we do primarily is industrial robots. And what that is, it’s a four to six axis articulated mechanism. It’s an arm. And there’s no AI. They have stuff like that.

But most of the operations that we do with the mechanisms are fixed. So that’s why we talk about high volume, low complexity. It’s because you basically set the system up to do one thing and do it perfectly all the time.

So that’s actually hard automation that you’re showing right there. That’s a mechanism that’s not flexible. It only does one thing it will never do anything else. The reason that that’s worth doing though is because that particular part, that’s an anchor, like a concrete anchor. You know what I’m talking about? You drill a hole in a piece of concrete, you drive that down into it.

Todd Honeyville (34:53.838): But that anchor will be made like forever. Like they’re never gonna not make that anchor. So that machine will run forever. As long as they maintain it, it’ll run and they’ll just run it forever and it’ll do what they need it to do. So that’s a good fit for hard automation. It’s an easy application that will run forever.

Nate (34:34.955): Yep. I’ve used them. Pounded in.

Nate (35:21.069): Where would I find one of the flexible ones? On that same page?

Todd Honeyville (35:24.696): Just hit about. Yeah, they’re just like on the page there. Just scroll down. I don’t know. We can also look on the web, but if you go to click the YouTube page, I don’t know where the link is somewhere there.

Nate (35:52.021): Yeah, I see the images now. I do not see one of the robotic arms that we were chatting about on this page anyway.

Todd Honeyville (36:01.77): Yeah, it’s really slow for me right now. I can’t really see what’s happening.

Todd Honeyville (36:08.716): Yeah, that’s a piece of hard automation too.

Nate (36:14.219): Yeah, I’ll share it and I’ll share a link in the bio to your website. People can check it out too.

Todd Honeyville (36:19.286): Okay. Well, you can look at the link and you can look on the website. There’s also some YouTube links. You can go to the YouTube channel and there’s some videos of like palletizers and material handling robots in there, the machine tending stuff that you could look at. And it’s a lot of robots, a lot of yellow robots, because we do a lot of FANUC work.

But we do other stuff too. I happen to have worked for FANUC like a long time ago, so I kind of tend towards FANUC just because it’s familiar.

Nate (36:52.706): So if somebody wanted to work with you on automation, is there a specific geographic area that you service?

Todd Honeyville (37:08.15): No, I mean, we tend to stay in the Chicago region just because we’re here. But we’ve done work in New York and Mississippi and California and Florida, Alabama. So no. We prefer regions like Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, but it doesn’t matter.

Todd Honeyville (37:38.146): We’ve shipped machines to Mexico even.

Nate (37:40.957): What is the most surprising or large change that you’ve seen in the robotics space over say the past five or six years?

Todd Honeyville (37:52.11): There really isn’t a lot of change in the industry in terms of interesting new developments. There’s some new tech that’s cool, but I’m not sure if anybody else would think it was a big deal. Like for example, have you ever heard of bin picking? So that’s a big one and it’s been kind of this thing that they’ve been promising us for a long time.

They said they had it maybe let’s say 10 years ago, they probably said they had it, but they didn’t. Like the big OEMs for robots said, hey, we can offer bin picking and they kind of couldn’t. But now they can. So that’s kind of a big win in the industry. Like you can do 3D part finding, locating is actually a real thing now.

And we’ve done some cool 3D quality control with these cameras, they’re called cameras, but they’re actually like camera range finder combinations. That’s really cool. And that’s been a pretty big deal.

Nate (39:03.927): So almost just finding parts that are out of spec with defects or whatnot as they’re going into the bin and then eliminating it.

Todd Honeyville (39:11.834): Yeah. Well, and you can pick unoriented parts in 3D space. That’s the big deal. So if, let’s say the factory, okay, I got an example. So in a stamping factory, the sheets go into the press, and it’s stamping parts. Let’s say they’re stamping a bracket. It’s a 3D part.

It stamps like an angel piece or something. It’s a bracket. And they just fall out. The way that they’ve done it historically is they put a bin underneath where the parts come out. All the parts are just coming out into the bin. So they’re unoriented. Let’s say the bin is big. It’s like a four foot by four foot bin.

Todd Honeyville (40:10.226): So then they take the bin currently and have to hand pick all of them out. And if there’s a secondary operation, let’s say they need to go into another machine to do drilling and tapping or something. So they have to hand pick all those out, load the other machine. Well, now we can actually do that with a robot. We couldn’t do that until recently.

So now what we do is put a 3D camera over the bin. And the robot can, or this camera system finds all the parts, identifies the top one, robot goes and picks it. And it actually can pick in 3D with 3D orientation. So now I can pick the part and know how I have it in my grip and put it into the machine.

So that’s a pretty new development and it’s a pretty big win for especially smaller manufacturers. The problem is, it’s kind of pricey still. So we just put in a system like that and the camera system alone was 30K cost. So you put that on top of the other system and it adds 20% more to your cost to be able to do that. But it could still be cost justifiable if you have a two shift operation or something.

Nate (41:34.401): Or if you have a lot of turnover in the position because it’s boring and you’re just having a hard time staffing it.

Todd Honeyville (41:38.05): Yeah, it’s not a fun job. I think that’s a big problem in manufacturing right now. These jobs are not fun.

Nate (41:47.093): What is the biggest challenge that you’re experiencing in business right now?

Todd Honeyville (41:55.95): Give me something to narrow down your question.

Nate (41:59.309): For example, could it be you’re wanting more growth, you’re not quite getting where you need to be with the exposure side of things, you’re having problems sourcing robotics because of tariffs, or what’s the biggest one?

Todd Honeyville (42:15.706): Well, so the tariffs if we’re gonna talk about tariffs, I don’t see a problem with tariffs. I’m kind of one of the few. In my circle meaning non-manufacturing, my personal circle, my friends and my family and things like that, there’s a lot of negativity about the tariffs right now, but that’s really not my experience. My experience already with the tariffs has been really good. I just posted on LinkedIn.

Nate (42:34.231): Thanks to the media.

Todd Honeyville (42:45.23): There’s a company called Automation Direct. Yeah, so I got an email from them saying what they were gonna change. And so they spelled it all out and I went on their website, downloaded their parts list with the pricing and everything and went through it and did a spreadsheet and quantified it all, because I wanted to know what really changed.

Nate (42:45.537): Yeah, I saw that. I saw that post. I was going to ask you about it. That’s interesting.

Todd Honeyville (43:14.986): And in the end, their overall pricing went down. So I like that. I think that that’s not going to hurt anybody if a big distributor of parts that are primarily sourced from imports is lowering all their prices after the tariffs. Like that means everybody can do that. So I’m going to do more business with them because they’re being cool.

Nate (43:45.301): Yeah, unlike Amazon who wants to put a price next to all of their products that says this is how much more you’re paying for this because of the tariffs.

Todd Honeyville (43:53.526): Yeah, so that’s not cool. And I’ve had other distributors do stuff like that, send me emails saying, we’re going to, at checkout, we’re going to put in a tariff surcharge. And so I’m kind of out. I mean, I’m sorry those guys have to think that they have to do that for their business, but I’m kind of out.

But having said that, I have to pay some tariffs. Some parts that I’m gonna buy have gone up in price. I’ve seen price increases on some stuff that we have to buy, including steel. We buy raw material to make frames and things like that. And those prices have gone up.

But saying that, I’m in the business of doing business with manufacturers. So manufacturing is getting really hot right now. They’re pulling ahead projects. Everybody’s looking for work. I don’t want to say my prices are going up because we’re really not raising our prices, but if I do five projects instead of three projects today, then that’s better for me.

My thought is over the next two, three years, our biggest hurdle is going to be trying to grow into what’s the opportunity that’s out there. And I don’t see the price increases as an issue at all. It’ll be way offset by the opportunity.

Nate (45:30.035): Yeah, I completely agree with you. I always try to remind people it’s been three months and it hasn’t even been three months since the tariffs went into place. It’s only been a month. So while the news wants to get you all fired up and like, this is killing people. It’s really not.

And sure, some people are having a rough time with it, but there are exemptions you can get. There’s a lot of different things that you can do, but it’s forcing people to do something that we’ve been saying for a long time, buy US, buy American made. And so now you got to buy American made. It’s just, this is enforced, which is a good thing. It’s gonna be a good thing for us. And I think that robotics can help us address some of that labor need, that labor shortage, that’s going to be huge.

Todd Honeyville (46:14.498): I agree.

Nate (46:21.247): And I think it’s going to have to be that. It’s going to have to be a lot of robotics.

Todd Honeyville (46:26.542): Right. Well, the biggest problem for factories is, I think that there’s two problems for factories in this environment. One’s gonna be, and it’s worse for smaller manufacturers and it’s gonna be easier for large manufacturers. And it’s primarily because, well, one, access to capital, two, comfortability with automation. But then the second hurdle, it’s really just… I lost my train of thought. I forgot what I was going to say.

Nate (47:00.525): There’s a lot of hurdles. I mean, there are a lot of hurdles. It’s a complex issue. And we talk about the complex issue of the labor shortage all the time. And it really comes down to, we just aren’t going to get our kids interested in this unless we either reframe it or we make the pay way higher.

Todd Honeyville (47:28.206): Well, and we’re not talking about, when you talk about that, you’re talking about trades. And the trades are definitely still gonna be important in the factories. The pay is actually really good. I just read an article, I can’t tell you where or what it was about specifically, but it was three people who had just graduated from trade school who all started at high five figure incomes.

That’s where the trades are right now. And so I don’t think that the money is a problem. It’s just people, one, probably don’t know about it. And two, think that it’s beneath them. That’s a big problem I think that we’ve had in the US over the last 20 years is that everybody has to get a college degree. And so we don’t have any tradespeople.

And that’s really separate from the operators. The operators are always the same. Those are the people who didn’t go to school for anything. And they work at McDonald’s or Walmart or the factory or whatever. And those people are important, but those aren’t the trades people.

Nate (48:43.693): Great. Yeah, that makes sense. So we’re going to have to wrap up here, but I think that you are going to be critical to really just facilitating this onshoring that’s going on in the next few years here. And I just want to make sure that your potential customers have any information they need. Like I said, we’ll put a link to you in the bio. Where would you like people to find you?

Todd Honeyville (49:15.854): Well, you can go to the website. It’s www.lioninc.us and you’re going to link that. And then you can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us on YouTube. You can send me an email. Our email is on the website. It’s info at lioninc.us or you can go direct to me. It’s Todd at lioninc.us.

Nate (49:37.769): Awesome. Well, you’re a wealth of information Todd. Thanks a lot for joining today and look forward to chatting with you some more in the future.

Todd Honeyville (49:45.166): Alright man, thanks.