Can Atlantic Canada’s Labour Shortage be Solved by Robotics?
Written by Nathan Field, Enginuity’s Robotics and Automation Manager
Atlantic Canada is facing a labour shortage issue that is not altogether unique in North America, but has been exacerbated due many smaller, often distinct but accumulating reasons.
What can a company do when they are losing employees and do not have anyone to fill the gap?
They could find people, or as will be explored in this whitepaper, automate the tasks they were doing.
Businesses are prioritizing Robotics and Automation
From our perspective, we’re seeing challenges that span from costly inefficiencies, labour shortages, to correcting human error. Robotics and automation have the potential to solve so many problems for companies and with each passing year the technology becomes more accessible to growing companies.
What industries are solving problems with automation?
The Pharmaceutical Industry
Unbound Chemical is a startup that tasked Enginuity with finding a solution to the labour-intensive practice of having to sort expired or unused pills from pharmacies. Enginuity developed a custom solution using machine vision and robotics to sort batches of pills into the proper categories. If you’d like to read more, check out this case study.
That’s it. That’s business, that’s start up, that’s innovation.“
The Food Processing Industry
For IMO Foods in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, a fairly remote rural community, they’ve been able to increase production and lighten the burden of finding labourers as we go through a labour shortage in Atlantic Canada.
Robotics and automation technologies are changing business.
Read more about some of the benefits of robotics and automation, more practical applications, and some of the preliminary aspects of adopting these technologies in our white paper. It could save your business more than you know!
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What’s inside
Benefits of Automation
Return on Investment (ROIs)
Health Check
Cobots
Machine Vision
AGVs and Material Movement
Atlantic Canada is facing a labour shortage issue that is not altogether unique in North America, but has been exasperated due many smaller, often distinct but accumulating reasons. In fact, in 2018 labour shortage study by the Business Development Bank of Canada stated:
50% of Atlantic Canadian businesses report difficulty in hiring employees during the last year (highest in the country) – An Exploration of Skills and Labour Shortages, ACOA, June 2019
The statement above naturally poses a question as to why, let us explore this in more detail. To allow for a slightly more detailed and pointed analysis we will focus on Nova Scotia as it displays – with greater contrast – the issues commonly present in Atlantic
Canada.
Although Halifax is a relatively densely populated city with 1077 people per square km and is Canadas 13th largest metropolitan area , there are many small rural townships.
In fact, over half of the people living in Nova Scotia do not live in Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM). Furthermore, although Halifax is seeing growth not seen since the 1970’s, rural Nova Scotia is suffering.
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