Motion Automation Intelligence Opens New Facility in Minnesota
October 24, 2022
Motion Automation Intelligence came about as a strategic path to position Motion Industries as an automation leader across our industrial base of customers. Our strategic intent is for us to be able to deploy all these best-in-class disciplines that we represent, from machine and motion control to pneumatics, to robotics, to vision, to industrial networking, to custom engineering solutions.
Motion’s history has been rich in the industrial side with many acquisitions, building on our advantages and solutions in the marketplace. We decided to really move on our acquisitions from the automation front because our customers were moving to more automation-based and robotic implementations. So we acquired five different business units over the past five to six years—BRAAS, Numatic Engineering, Axis New England/New York, F&L Industrial Solutions, and Applied Machine and Motion Control—that covered different key pieces to automation throughout the US.
In 2022, we acquired Kaman Distribution Group, which had groups named Kaman Automation and Integro Technologies that both were brought into the Motion Automation Intelligence team. We interviewed a lot of our customers that were closely aligned to those businesses, and we found that a lot of our growth in those areas was due to our know-how, people and our ability to address various applications with automation robotics. That intelligence really was key to what we were doing. The automation side was an important component, and obviously Motion, being pretty much the parent of all these businesses.
We decided to rebrand this entire vision, which brought upon the name of Motion Automation Intelligence—Motion Automation Intelligence. The vision behind that is collecting all our key engineers and technologies that we represent to the marketplace where our customers can feel very much at home—not just locally, but regionally and nationally with one common brand and one common reach to the market.
Now we're seven different divisions across the country that hone in on specific areas of discipline to bring those solutions forward to our customers. We have centers of excellence in robotics and cobots, machine vision, engineering, industrial networking and industrial framing. These groups concentrate their engineering efforts on different application challenges that come across that discipline, and we can deploy their solutions across the country.
We start with proof-of-concept design, meaning that we first come in looking at and assessing the problem that the end customer may have. It could be a machine builder, an end user on a process, or a systems integrator company looking to solve a really tough challenge that they couldn’t do with the selection of products they originally had. Our proof of concept allows our engineers to take the time to understand the challenge, as well as the attributes that make the application successful and enable the customer to net out the return on investment needed to fully experience automation and robotics.
For example, an application that we sell for is in food and beverage. We have a packaging end customer who is deploying equipment and machinery to package potato chips. Today, if you go down an aisle in any grocery, you find quite a variety of chips. You can go to plain, flavored chip, or spicy chips, and you can have them in different sizes as well. That creates a stressful environment in a manufacturing sector if you've only been used to manufacturing one type of size and flavor and offering. So manufacturers have created flexible machinery environments that they would deploy so they could care for a lot of the variety and variability within their product. A machine builder that we service today has to consider a machine design that allows for changeover across all those different offerings, alongside knowing when to deploy the specific size they need to package.
That requires a lot of software integration connectivity that we also can help that end customer with. It really is a full mechatronic solution.
The mechanical design starts off with “how do you care for all this variability?” We are there at the onset with proof of concept, and then you get into the electronic side where you start to figure out, "Okay, how do I deploy this control architecture to care for all that flexibility?" And now you think about the software; what would that look like from an operator or user interface perspective? Make it easy to work with all this equipment alongside all the different changes that would come down with the kind of end product it needs to produce. Moreover, the connectivity—how that information needs to go to and from a plant manufacturing system.
With all that said, this is where the different kinds of machines are evolving too. They're highly connected, software-centric, and very much in an environment to be deployed flexibly for changeover accommodations because it needs to satisfy that end customer at a faster rate. Our goal is to be knowledge at the point of customer contact. What that means is that we are experts in the products and understand applications well with our offering of automation robotics, alongside being able to provide a complete solution.
So from proof of concept to product type, real intimacy and know-how alongside a service that follows, we’re able to inventory product locally and value-engineer it.
In other words, we put it together in a form that allows the best application implementation for the customer. And then, at times, we'll design to build.
Once the design is fully positioned, we can then take on the task of building it all up and providing one product to the end customer to deploy. Typically in past implementations, customers could source a lot of the components, understand how to engineer it, put it together, and have the resources to deploy that end product.
Today's environment doesn't allow that flexibility for a lot of our customers, so they rely on us to be that engineering partner for all these different services to be utilized. Maybe not at every application challenge, but certainly over time, our customers lean on all those services we provide.
