“When we install this automated line we can eliminate three jobs.”
This is probably the stupidest thing that I have ever overheard. (I was eating lunch at a rest stop on the turnpike home from a recent trip.)
There are at least 600,000 high tech manufacturing jobs currently unfilled in the US and Canada.
We know that there are about 391,000 Baby Boomer generation machinists that will be leaving the workforce in the next few years.
- Who in their right mind wants to eliminate people?
- They have proven that they can come to work
- They have proven they can do the work
- They have proven that they can add value
The point of automation isn’t to eliminate jobs. It is to eliminate non-value added labor.
The employees have already demonstrated that they can add value. Automation should free them up to add even more, higher value added to your operations.
I believe that people should be engaged at their highest and best use. Or, as Norbert Wiener once wrote – The Human Use of Human Beings.
The point of automation is to let you elevate your existing talent to their highest and best use.
Any thing else is The 8th Waste- unused creativity of our people.
Automate to elevate. Not to eliminate. Good people are hard enough to find.
Why would you eliminate your great ones?