The Automotive Leaders Podcast · Jan Griffiths

Why Automation Fails in Manufacturing and the Leadership Shift Required to Fix It

·34 min·2 clips

Peters says buyers need a fast feasibility assessment or the automation plan dies in analysis.

The conversation opens on reindustrializing America and the push to bring production home. That ambition quickly runs into familiar obstacles: labor shortages, skill gaps, rising costs, and tariffs. Automation enters the picture as a response, but not as a neat fix. Jan Griffiths keeps bringing the discussion back to education and the human side of the problem. Soren says companies often underestimate how much education automation actually requires. Vendors and integrators may be able to deliver one kind of education, while factory teams need a broader understanding of what was changed. That mismatch can stall a project before it ever proves itself. The episode frames that mismatch as a management issue, not just a technical one. A robot is described as a worker with different behaviors and different operational needs. That means management has to be trained alongside the factory team. The conversation also pushes back on the idea that automation matters simply because it is modern. Companies should buy it because it changes what they can actually produce. If a system does not improve throughput or capability, the purchase loses its reason for being. Soren uses a manufacturing example to show the difference between buying equipment and solving a business problem. The point lands through a comparison to how companies once learned to manage IT more strategically. In both cases, the market had to move from fascination to clearer functional demands. The episode suggests manufacturing automation is still in that education phase. That is why promising projects can die when the estimated cost reaches the executive table. The talk leaves listeners with a practical picture of why automation fails when education, management, and expectations are out of sync. It also shows what has to change if factories want new technology to stick.

As heard by us

Automation stalls when the people, training, and expectations around it are not aligned.

The episode frames automation in manufacturing as a management and education problem, not simply a hardware purchase. Jan Griffiths and Soren trace the pressure on factories to bring production home while labor shortages, skill gaps, rising costs, and tariffs keep piling up.

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Why you'd press play

You need the leadership case behind automation that keeps stalling.

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