Auburn Hills — Artificial intelligence that has made it easier to use industrial robots is contributing to expansion of one automation supplier in Oakland County.
Japanese supplier Fanuc Corp. on Wednesday held the grand opening of a $110 million, 650,000-square-foot manufacturing site at 2600 Featherstone Road in Auburn Hills visible off Interstate 75. The building the size of 10 football fields will produce and retrofit robots, contributing to Fanuc’s work in shipping hundreds of products per month, Fanuc America CEO Mike Cicco said. In the future, renovation of a former building of the Cooley Law School on the site will provide an additional 100,000 square feet to train employees of its customers to use, program and service the equipment. In the past five years, Fanuc has created more than 400 jobs in Michigan.
A third of Fanuc America’s business is done in the automotive sector, another third for automotive suppliers and the final slice is general industry that includes aerospace, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, logistics, warehousing and retail uses.
“More industries are starting to use industrial automation as businesses grow,” Cicco told The Detroit News after a ribbon-cutting ceremony in which two Fanuc-built collaborative robots held up the yellow band. “Some of the need for this (expansion) is the growth in other industries, as robots have become more prevalent and more easy to use. Even smaller and smaller companies are starting to see the benefits of utilizing industrial automation. So, even there’s some customers here today that may be just be a few people in a machine shop that see the need to use industrial robots to do some of the repetitive tasks of tending the machine.”
Fanuc’s Americas region recorded a 21% year-over-year increase in sales to $390 million (62.4 billion Japanese yen) in the January-to-March quarter. Fanuc has 6,000 robots at 1,600 North American high schools and colleges to help increase exposure and familiarity of people to robots. Artificial intelligence also has helped facilitate that growth, Cicco said.
“It really makes things easier to use,” he said. “It takes things that used to require a highly trained person to go in for months and months at a time to program something, and now, because we’ve written a lot of advanced software using AI, it makes something that’s very complicated very easy to use.”
There’s growth happening in the automotive sector, too, Cicco noted. Billions of dollars in investments for new electric vehicle plants and battery manufacturing sites as well as continued production of gas-powered and hybrid models create demand for robots. Given the cyclical nature of the industry, though, Fanuc is eager to grow the diversification of its business.
The new campus gives Fanuc more than 2 million square feet in Oakland County, including its Fanuc America headquarters in Rochester Hills and the adjacent North Campus in Auburn Hills built in 2019. The West Campus, which sits less than 2 miles from those sites, will give more space to operations for building robot transfer units used in auto assembly plant body shops, retrofitting generic robots with components for particular applications and developing systems for automaker and supplier uses.
These operations previously were housed on the North Campus, but the West Campus will provide more space. Capacity for the manufacturing of automotive paint-shop robots will increase by moving to the North Campus from the company’s headquarters, providing more room at the headquarters for bigger laboratories to do customer demonstrations and innovate new product.
“The utmost dedication to grow that research and development through the collaboration of Fanuc America and Fanuc headquarters,” Fanuc Chairman Yoshiharu Inaba said during the ribbon-cutting ceremony, “is empowering industry worldwide.”
Covering 106 countries, Fanuc has 282 locations globally, including in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington and others.
“They had options; they didn’t have to be here, and so we are grateful that they chose to be here,” Quentin Messer Jr., Michigan Economic Development Corp. CEO, said during the presentation. “We are executing the Make It in Michigan Economic Development Strategy focused on attracting and developing people; cultivating, revitalize places; and then competing for winning projects. You can’t have the type of services and resources that are in Oakland County and Auburn Hills without having jobs, someone to contribute to the tax base.”
On top of the investment already made into the West Campus, Fanuc will open the Fanuc Academy at the former law school. The company has been training employees of its customers from maintenance technicians to robot programmers and developers at its headquarters in 14 classrooms with 100 robots. The new academy will provide more space and have thousands of robots to use for training of high school graduates up to doctorate holders. Fanuc hasn’t said when the academy will open or how much it’s investing for it.
“Our goal — and it’s an audacious goal,” Oakland County Executive David Coulter said, “is that 80% of our adults in Oakland County have something beyond the high school education, college degree or certification or training. The training that (Fanuc is) going to provide here is going to help me get to that goal.”
Fanuc’s robots are doing a lot of supplementing work to offer manufacturers more flexibility, to help them be more efficient and to do dangerous work, Cicco said. Working with robots often makes factory work more enjoyable and provides higher-pay opportunities because of the skills required to use them, he added.
“If done right,” he said about automation, “the efficiencies increase, the volume increases and it actually increases jobs in a factory.”
@BreanaCNoble
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