If you've spent any time looking at our shop floor, or even if you just follow us on socials, you'll have seen our robots. The welder running its own programmed passes. The laser cutter working through sheet metal without a hand on it. For a lot of people, that raises an obvious question: who lost their job for that robot to be there?
For us, the honest answer is no one. So we figured it was worth explaining how that's actually possible, and why it's not as surprising to us as it might be to everyone else.
Sixty years of the same question
Tech evolution... this isn't new territory for us. We're sixty years into this business, and in that time we've never once sat still on technology. It's a point of pride (and passion!) for us.
In that time, wire forming has changed. Metal pressing has changed. Cutting has changed. In six decades, if we look at it closely, very little hasn't changed actually.
Every one of those shifts looked, at the time, like the kind of change that should cost jobs. But for us, none of them did. We've never treated new equipment or new tech as a replacement for people, instead, we've treated it as an opportunity for all of us to get better at what we do.
So, when robotic welding and automated laser cutting showed up on our radar, we didn't approach it any differently to every other piece of equipment we've brought in over six decades. The question was never, 'how many people can this replace?' It was, 'what can this let our people do that we couldn't do before?'
What robots actually replaced
Robots are awesome, there's no denying it. Like everyone, we've been watching all the movies for years and waiting for this kind of tech to become reality, especially in our field. And now, finally, they're here.
The thing is, though they don't get tired, and they are good at precision, they aren't perfect. There's still a lot (and we mean a lot!) of things they can't do (at least for now), or that they aren't good at yet, that are vital to our work.
Robots are very good at the repetitive, high-volume, physically taxing work, the same weld or the same cut, over and over, with total consistency.
Humans are very good at everything that isn't that: setting up the job properly, catching the thing that looks slightly wrong before it becomes a problem, solving a one-off issue a robot has no way of recognising, and deciding what 'good' actually looks like for a part that's never been made before.
Put a robot on the repetitive run and you free up your most experienced people for the work that actually needs their judgement.
That's exactly what's happened on our floor. We haven't reduced staff numbers as we've brought in robotic arms, automation and other tech. We've upskilled the people who were already here.
Operators who used to run a process by hand are now the ones programming and overseeing it, which, if you ask most of them, beats standing in the same spot doing the same motion for an entire shift. Most of our team has genuinely embraced it. Nobody we've spoken to is nostalgic for the repetitive parts of the old way.
If anything, the human role has grown more important, not less. Quality assurance is a good example. A robot will repeat exactly what it's told to do, which is precisely the problem if what it's told to do is slightly wrong.
Someone still has to set the parameters, inspect the output, and know what a finished weld or a clean cut is actually supposed to look like across a hundred different jobs with a hundred different specs. That's not a task you can automate your way out of. It takes people who've done this long enough to know the difference between a part that looks fine and a part that is fine.
Is there still a place for people?
And that points to something bigger about why we don't think people are going anywhere, in our business or in this industry generally.
We're not a factory that makes the same single product on repeat. We work across defence, agriculture, and corporate clients with proprietary parts and real confidentiality requirements, and a lot of what comes through our door isn't a finished spec, it's a problem. A part that needs to survive conditions nobody's quite tested for. A design that needs to be manufacturable, not just drawable.
Technology helps us solve those problems faster and more precisely than we used to. But the solving itself, again and again, comes down to people in this building who've seen enough variations of 'this needs to work' to know what will actually hold up.
It's worth asking the question properly, though, rather than just assuming the answer: is there still a place for humans in this industry as things keep evolving?
We think there clearly is, and not just so we can sound good. The more capable the equipment gets, the more value sits in the people who decide how it's used.
We've got plenty of stories where a customer came to us with a problem that didn't have an obvious solution on paper, and it wasn't a piece of software that cracked it. It was someone on our floor who'd built enough of these parts to know which approach would actually work in practice, not just in theory. That kind of experience doesn't show up in a spec sheet, and it's not something a robot develops on its own. It's built over years, on a floor, solving real problems for real customers, which is exactly the environment we've spent sixty years creating.
The same approach, sixty years running
So, to whoever's asked us that question on the shop floor video: no one lost a job to a robot here. What's actually happened is that the same people who've always made this business what it is, are now doing more interesting work, backed by better tools, and we've grown our capacity in the process. That's not a new strategy for us. It's the same one we've been running for sixty years. The tools just keep getting cooler!
Talk to our team about how powder coating now fits into a fully integrated build.