Take Misumi, a Tokyo distributor of factory automation tools and metal molds used for casting parts.
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The full capability of sensors began about 50 years ago when factory automation started to come into play.
And increased factory automation would reduce the primary attraction of outsourcing to China.
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He switched from factory automation to computer-assisted surgery in the late 1980s.
The company provides systems for testing and examining the mechanical behavior of materials, products and structures, as well as instrumentation for factory automation.
He then took a job as head of factory automation for nearby ASC Industries, maker of automobile water pumps and one of his old customers.
Factory automation and technology improvement mask this important megatrend.
In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work.
U.S. manufacturers now produce three and a half times more output per worker hour than they did in the peak employment year of 1979, in part because offshoring has sent many low-value jobs overseas, but also because automation has replaced lots of factory jobs.
Compared with booming profits, rich-country workers have lost out, as Chinese factory workers, Indian software engineers and the spread of computer automation undermine bargaining power and wage growth.
Horn posited that the automation of things--starting with biological processes and continuing up to factory assembly lines--has consistently been the foundation for progress in human society.
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