Automation hits full stride at Belimo, highlighting need for retraining of workers

James Furlong, left, president of Belimo Americas and John Forlenzo, a vice president/ customizing and logistics, give a tour of the Danbury facility, Wednesday, August 16, 2017. James Furlong, left, president of Belimo Americas and John Forlenzo, a vice president/ customizing and logistics, give a tour of the Danbury facility, Wednesday, August 16, 2017. Photo: Carol Kaliff / Hearst Connecticut Media Photo: Carol Kaliff / Hearst Connecticut Media Image 1 of / 21 Caption Close Automation hits full stride at Belimo, highlighting need for retraining of workers 1 / 21 Back to Gallery

With acronyms such as ASRS, AGV, ISO and WMS guiding the factory operations at Belimo Americas headquarters in Danbury, it is clear the next generation of manufacturing has come to Connecticut.

Belimo, which makes actuators, valves and sensors for heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, built its state-of-the-art, 200,000-square-foot headquarters on the top of a hill in west Danbury in 2014. With its highly automated manufacturing systems, it is a prime example of the need for advanced manufacturing employees in the state.

“How do we do what we do more efficiently? When automation is a means to get us there, we employ it,” James Furlong, president of Belimo Americas, said. “If automation can reduce our lead times and make our delivery time more predictable … those are the driving factors. It would be a very complex manual system to try to do this.”

Belimo’s automated storage and retrieval system, or ASRS, area features 41-foot ceilings with a combination of machines and employees seamlessly receiving and fulfilling orders in real time. Every assembler on the floor has a computer monitor at their work station.

Larger containers are stored by turret trucks that allow operators to be eye level with storage spaces 40 feet high. The wire-guided trucks fit into narrow aisles and operators use computer monitors in the sitting area to view their next task. The cranes know where every piece of inventory is and can store or retrieve an item in seconds from any of the 15,000 bays that are stacked vertically to the ceiling.

“We did an analysis of man vs. ASRS,” John Forlenzo, vice president of customizing and logistics at Belimo Americas, said. “I won’t even throw a number out there, but ASRS is significantly faster and uses much less space because it can take advantage of vertical space.”

Belimo’s manufacturing will soon become even more high-tech as it introduces an automated guided vehicle, or AGV, to its floor. Using lasers and reflectors, an AGV is basically a driverless forklift. At Belimo, AGVs will move products around the perimeter of the ASRS floor for more efficient delivery to different areas of the manufacturing floor.

It is part of the lean manufacturing process used at Belimo, which aims for maximum efficiency and with as little waste of time and space as possible.

“Machines move more parts from place to place and people focus on tasks that require thinking,” Furlong said.

Need for skilled labor

The shift to advanced manufacturing has created a dearth of trained employees in the state. In a 2017 study, the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, or CBIA, predicts that there will be more than 13,000 job openings in 14 manufacturing job categories by the end of 2018.

Community colleges and technical high schools have begun to expand their advanced manufacturing programs, but the need to fill such positions far outweighs the qualified candidate pool, CBIA officials said.

“There’s a manufacturing renaissance going on in Connecticut,” Pete Gioia, economist with CBIA, said.

Gioia pointed to last Thursday’s job numbers released by the state Department of Labor that showed Connecticut lost 600 jobs in July and has recovered only 82.3 percent of the jobs lost from the recession that started in 2008. “If we could fill those 13,000 jobs, that would be a home run, really,” he said.

Naugatuck Valley Community College reported last week the job placement rate is 100 percent for graduates of its Advanced Manufacturing Training Certificate program. Forlenzo said Belimo uses students from Henry Abbott Technical High School in Danbury as apprentices and potential hires following graduation.

“The last person we hired was from Abbott Tech,” he said.

Gioia said automation could displace workers in the retail industry in the coming years, but automation in manufacturing creates as many jobs as it displaces. Workers, however, need to be trained or retrained.

“The more robots we have, the more product we can push out, and the more product we can push out the greater the need is in fulfillment. It’s a win-win,” Gioia said. “Machines are faster, cheaper, better. They don’t take days off and there’s no need for worker’s comp. But you still need people to build and service the robots.

“We shouldn’t decry the use of robots,” he added. “It’s making the U.S. more competitive. What used to be done outside of the country is being done here.”

Speaking at a meeting of her STEM advisory board earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty said: “Automation is seen as an enemy. It just requires different skill sets and people need to be retrained.”

According to CBIA’s 2017 Survey of Connecticut Manufacturing Workforce Needs, there are more than 4,000 manufacturing firms in the state and 159,000 people working in the industry, representing nearly 10 percent of the state’s workforce. The survey showed that nearly all manufacturers plan to expand their workforce in the next three years.

“Don’t think for a minute we aren’t a manufacturing state, because we are,” Donald Klepper-Smith, chief economist and director of research at DataCore Partners, said at the Greater Danbury Chamber of Commerce’s Economic Forecast Breakfast earlier this year.

Strong labor force

Furlong said Belimo has not had trouble finding skilled employees to fill its manufacturing positions. Belimo employs about 300 people in Danbury, 200 in production. While he described the labor pool as “tight,” he said Belimo has a strong reputation in the community and is known as a good place to work.

“We don’t have dozens of people knocking on our door every day looking for jobs, but we have been successful in attracting high-quality employees,” Furlong said. “It’s a good labor force. We’ve never had a reason to start disrupting our operation and look elsewhere for labor.”

Like Danbury itself, Belimo prides itself on diversity. Furlong said 14 different languages are spoken by employees at the company. Belimo also employs 44 people from Ability Beyond, a Bethel-based nonprofit organization that, among other services, helps people with disabilities find employment.

Belimo was founded in Switzerland in 1975. It expanded to the U.S. in 1989 and expanded its Danbury operations in 1992, 1998 and 2014. The new facility, Furlong said, features the “most sophisticated hydronics lab in the world.”

The facility, despite being only three years old, will be a place of constant change, Furlong and Forlenzo said, as manufacturing evolves. Furlong said light assembly used to be the largest part of the company’s manufacturing process; now it is the smallest.

“The way we do things today is not the way it will be done in 2015,” Forlenzo said. “There’s continuous innovation. The bar is always moving.”

cbosak@hearstmediact.com; 203-731-3338