Working Side by Side to Advance Manufacturing Innovation

This article appeared in the October 2025 issue of MiMfg Magazine. Read the full issue and find past issues online.

In Michigan’s vibrant manufacturing world, innovation is being accomplished every day through thousands of partnerships and supplier relationships that are essential to the industry. These valuable resources are available to help small and medium-sized businesses — which make up 90 percent of the state’s industry — achieve their goals for automation.

Often, companies lack the equipment, tools or staff to implement Industry 4.0 solutions despite a desire to automate and make operations more efficient. Developing partnerships with companies that specialize in the complementary areas of manufacturing, such as software design and equipment integration, can be an effective and cost-efficient gateway to achieving those goals.

Faster and Better Together

Ada-based GTF Technologies could have hired new team members, invested in costly machining equipment, pored through research and spent months, if not years, optimizing their innovative RENUTM System.

But a much better solution was to seek out a partner — and they found one in Holland-based custom automation machine builder Mission Design & Automation. Mission already had the knowledge and experience needed to customize solutions for machines such as the industry-leading RENU System, which pulverizes and dries leftover or unneeded food products within seconds.

The system has several primary components, including forced and conditioned air, controlled temperatures, a powerful motor and the proprietary mill. GTF’s engineers had the concepts, specs, drawings and other essentials for the milling component but not the equipment and specific expertise necessary to bring the mill to life. GTF Founder Gary Schuler had the rudimentary design and mechanics of the system but it wasn’t optimized for manufacturing floors at food-grade factories.

“Partnering with Mission, which has tremendous expertise in custom machine builds, allowed us to move very quickly and work together to create the best solutions from our concepts,” says Liz Weaver, Director of Marketing and Business Development at GTF Technologies.

Such partnerships are critical for manufacturers who hope to keep pace with modern needs by advancing their technology and automated systems. Interconnected relationships support the entire industry through shared insights and use of innovative products and services. If businesses do not collaborate to complement their solutions for customers, they may face challenges in the future.

“Something our team says a lot is people get stuck looking at the bark of the tree, and sometimes it helps to have someone help you look at the forest line,” Weaver says. “That’s what Mission helped us with. We had our own thoughts and ideas but, when you have different engineers and people with differing expertise, they can help you look at it a different way and problem-solve together with you.”

Sami Birch, Director of Marketing at Mission Design & Automation, says that, by partnering with manufacturers to make them aware of technologies that can help them meet their goals, they can help the businesses combat labor shortages, work more efficiently and enhance workplace safety via automation integration.

“We really listen to our customers to understand what their challenges are, what keeps them up at night, what are their current processes compared to where they’d like to be, and then we work together to figure out how they can go from Point A to Point B and what tool or systems can make that possible,” she says. “We consider many different technologies and applications to see how they may work together to achieve that specific, unique goal for that business.”

Through years of experience tailoring solutions to customers’ specific needs, integrators have firsthand knowledge about what works, what doesn’t, how to optimize these solutions and how to implement them effectively.

For these reasons, manufacturers who are looking to start implementing automation and AI solutions should start with reaching out to a system integrator for technology integration, she says.

“You don’t have to boil the ocean,” Birch says. “An integrator team has often seen so many applications across manufacturing industry segments and developed custom automation solutions that have never been made before, so they know how to navigate some of these difficult production challenges and design, build and integrate a system to meet businesses where they are.”

Using “cool” robots to replace positions that are hard to hire for, redundant or dangerous can also combat labor shortages, while also making workplaces more attractive, intriguing and exciting for future talent, she says.

“Michigan is a great state for manufacturing and for automation integration,” Birch adds. “By using a ‘we all get better together’ mindset toward the development of more automated systems that help manufacturers grow, it helps us learn from each other, push technology forward, and helps the state overall.”

Resources for Technology and Equipment

Many business owners want to leverage modern automation, but understanding what types of solutions are ideal, having access to them and having the financial means to implement them can deter them from doing so.

Saman Farid, CEO of Chicago-based Formic, says they began the company four years ago because they recognized that small and medium-sized manufacturers need access to automation advancements in order to survive and thrive.

He recalls that when they started Formic, many of their manufacturing clients told them, “‘We know that we’re going to go out of business if we don’t automate. We’ve been trying to do it for the last 10 years, and we still haven’t figured out how to get a single robot deployed.’”

“In order for them to compete — whether that’s domestically with smaller companies or globally with larger companies — these factories need to find ways to grow their productivity and get access to much more robotic labor,” he adds. “These robots must be more accessible to people who need them, and that means simplifying it as much as possible, taking away all of the risk, taking away all of the complexity, taking away as much of the cost as humanly possible so that these factories can automate effectively.”

These principles led to the development of Formic and its unique Full Service Automation business model, wherein clients can use customized robots or other automated equipment in their own facilities on a cost-per-month basis. If the business no longer needs the robot, it is returned to Formic, and the business only pays for the time that a machine is in use.

As a result, the businesses can integrate these automated systems without investing in the technology upfront, owning the machine, designing the solution, maintaining the equipment or hiring additional engineers to devise the answers to their challenges.

What integrating robots does do is:

• Reduce or eliminate the need for humans to handle repetitive, time-consuming, physically strenuous tasks.
• Allow employers to move employees who had been handling these tasks to jobs that require human intelligence, reasoning and emotion.
• Allow the businesses to run more shifts, as the robots can operate 24/7.
• Optimize end-of-line steps and supplement quality assurance processes.
• Provide business managers with insightful data that can help the company fine-tune products and processes to improve their bottom lines.
• Minimize slowdowns caused by employees’ time off.
• Allow businesses to remain competitive.

About 80 percent of Formic’s clients never had a robot in the past, and now many of the customers have reported a positive impact.

One such business is Holland-based Boxed Water Is Better, which provides high-quality drinking water in paper-based containers. Each case of water weighs about 28 pounds, and the team had been stacking the cases by hand, according to Director of Operations Rick Kulas.

After Formic installed a robotic palletizer and pallet pad dispenser at the business, Boxed Water quickly realized the benefits — reducing the physical strain on workers, reducing fatigue caused by redundancy, increasing employees’ job satisfaction and being able to move employees to other roles in the company.

“It makes the day easier for our team because they’re not lifting cases, and it adds a lot more flexibility because we know that the robot will be there,” Kulas says.

Transitioning skilled workforces away from repetitive, manual tasks into more strategic and creative roles that are focused on business outcomes is a central theme of Industry 4.0. Boxed Water’s experience is a valuable example of that.

“Those types of workers shouldn’t be spending their time doing back-breaking, dangerous, repetitive tasks,” Farid says. “That time should be spent applying their knowledge to provide the highest value-add work that they can.”

Boxed Water was able to achieve these benefits without the legwork, as the Formic team surveyed the site, determined precisely what the company needed, made sure the proposed technology fit the layout and customized the robot based on specific dimensions, weights, pallet patterns and how the cases are stacked. Once the robot was built, the Formic team installed it within three days.

“A big thing with robotics is that they’re specialized, so you can’t go in there and just program them yourself,” Kulas says. “Especially in a small company, you likely don’t have that in-house expertise, so it’s nice to rely on a company that does that for you.”

Formic’s program includes on-site or remote maintenance, so companies can have peace of mind in knowing they have that support. Formic’s solutions also illustrate the power of AI-powered predictive maintenance, which enables them to proactively recognize and fix errors before they become issues for their clients.

“With Formic, the cost to entry is low and the risk is low,” Kulas says. “I’m not expending all that capital upfront to force myself to make it work; that’s their job.”

Michigan is home to approximately 11,400 small or medium-sized manufacturing businesses, many of which are facing similar circumstances, but resources and partners are available throughout the country that can help them automate.

“America has realized that we need to have control over our supply chains and our fate, and what that means is there’s tremendous support for manufacturers to scale up their businesses and to figure out ways to adapt to the modern age,” Farid says. “Manufacturers should not be fearful of these new technologies but leverage them and jump in headfirst because they’re really critical to success.”

Today’s workers should learn how to work alongside robots, program robots and leverage the power of AI, he adds.

“All these AI tools are enabling humans to have superpowers, to make better decisions and to have more capabilities,” Farid says. “We watch these movies about superheroes, but that’s really the age we live in today. We can have superhuman strength through robots and we can have superhuman memory through AI and we can have superhuman processing speed through calculation.”

Automation comes in many forms — from relatively simple data application integrations to massive, jaw-dropping AI robots — and manufacturers can benefit by implementing these solutions into production lines, administrative processes, customer pipelines or even financial record-keeping and organizational tasks. Leveraging these solutions can be easier and more financially feasible when manufacturers work together to meet their mutual goals.

Have a manufacturing story to tell? E-mail communications@mimfg.org.