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Rising automation requires clear risk management strategy

Automation is helping manufacturers reduce bottlenecks but it also comes with risks. Successful brands will have clear risk management strategies.

Automation’s primary goal is to supervise and optimise processing phases while reducing labour costs, which account for around 50% of total production costs. Automation can plug this labour gap, reducing dependency while improving production efficiency and bolstering quality assurance.

Research indicates that adopting automation is a key strategy for countries like Japan, which has an ageing population and experiences labour shortages.

Manufacturers are increasingly adopting automation throughout their operations and processing stages across different food and drink categories.

In its recent State of the Industry report, the UK food industry trade association, Food and Drink Federation (FDF), found that companies are investing in increased automation. Companies of all sizes, but particularly small and medium enterprises (SMEs), plan to use automation to address labour shortages.

Staff are a key part of this investment, though, with 24% of companies confirming they plan to increase skills and training investment to upskill existing staff and enable them to deliver automation. This figure was 8% in the FDF’s previous report.

In a 2025 report, McKinsey Global Institute confirms that our future workplaces will be a partnership among people, agents and robots.

A negative impact on flexibility

“Automation is essential to remain competitive – but it can make you less flexible,” Mathew Simpson, sales manager at CSB-System, told this publication.

CSB-System is a US company that provides enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solutions for various industrial sectors, including the food industry.

Automation technology during installation can, for instance, determine a product’s packaging size. If the technology locks in this specific size without room for modification, it will apply it throughout product development. Changing the size will then require significant investment and a long lead time.

The worst-case scenario for manufacturers is that changing the packaging size might not be possible, resulting in lost investment, ingredients, materials and time. Best case, the changeover time may take longer and require more specialist skills, where in the past a line leader or in-house technician would correct the sizing and restart manufacturing.

Automation challenges can be met with automation solutions. Where a longer changeover time is required, manufacturers may use palletising robots to correct errors and boost productivity, reducing lost lead time.

As robotic picking and automation have become more widespread in food and drink manufacturing, programming has become easier. Yet, teaching robots a new stacking pattern is often more complex than communicating this to staff. However, if a manufacturer’s robot can only handle a maximum pack size that falls short of a new customer's demands, it can’t be used.

“It is important to try to think several moves ahead and build in as much flexibility as possible to support possible new products or processes in future,” said Simpson.

Calibration, creativity, and complacency concerns

Manufacturers using automation in their product development process need to calibrate the technology to fit the rest of the process.

“You can’t go faster than your bottleneck,” said Simpson.

Introducing automation and increasing capacity in primary processes will not speed up production and performance if manufacturers have to stop the line to let downstream processes catch up.

Also, while automated systems often increase line speeds and throughput, an equipment breakdown can lead to a much larger drop in production volume, which may require specialist technicians to fix.

“Automation tends to make you less self-sufficient: you come to rely on third-party companies to fix or maintain automated systems,” said Simpson.

While this can free up time and energy to focus on adding process value, automation can mean manufacturers lose this element of creative problem-solving. It leaves them dependent on the third party's timetables and capacity, and you may not always get service as soon as you want.

Automation tends to reduce errors, but it can also lead to complacency among operatives, causing problems to go unnoticed for too long.

“You can delegate tasks but not responsibility,” said Simpson. Automation systems may run correctly 99% of the time. Manufacturers may then become solely reliant on the assumption that nothing will ever go wrong and that the machines are responsible for output.

Machines and automated systems can also malfunction.

“More often than that, they can be fed with the wrong information or not updated with new information,” said Simpson.

An automated system could, for instance, apply the wrong label, heat process or stacking pattern. Manual checks, therefore, still need to be maintained despite the logical intuition, based on experience, that they are not necessary most of the time.