Manufacturers are turning to automation as the only option to get productivity up and maintain it, to have machines running consistently, and to have one person run three, four and five machines as a machine tender,” said Marchand. “They can keep the robot loaded with queues of parts so that the robot can feed the machine at a steady pace. I’d add further that with our machines automation is almost exclusively via multiaxis robots, because most of our parts are odd-shaped, may be imbalanced and they’re usually produced in low volume.