Price Industries casts eyes on four-year, AI-enabled partnership

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This article was published 05/03/2024 (612 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The low-hanging fruit for manufacturers benefiting from automation and robotics is in mass-produced products.

However, for companies with many different products sold in smaller volumes, advanced manufacturing solutions are harder to attain.

Price Industries, the North American leader in non-residential air movement technologies, finds itself in the high mix/low volume zone. With thousands of different products in its catalogue, the Winnipeg company will be making and shipping hundreds of different products every day.

It knew it could benefit from automation technologies — if it could just come up with the right application.

Price has now teamed up with a pair of Manitoba companies to design an artificial intelligence-enabled manufacturing execution system (MES) that will take advantage of efficiency technologies that do not currently exist for it in the market today.

Along with Mode40 (a manufacturing software design shop out of Steinbach) and Innovair (a Winnipeg distributor of robotics equipment for the manufacturing industry), Price is working on the project partially funded by NGen, the country’s advanced manufacturing supercluster.

Called “Discrete Manufacturing Assembly Transformation,” the four-year project is expected to be transformational for Price, director of engineering services Graham Fediuk said Monday,

“This is something that does not exist. It will be novel and new.”

As such, Fediuk believes it will enhance Price’s position as leader in the industry. Even though it will likely eventually mean the inclusion of robotics on the assembly floor, Fediuk believes it’s not something employees should think will compromise employment security.

“Right now, we are the market leaders in North America, but there is always competition,” he said. “This will push us to the next level, further distancing ourselves from our competitors and it will ensure that our company remains relevant for years to come.

“We expect that to grow our market share and grow our employment base — not reduce it.”

The NGen funding requires the main proponent (in this case, Price Industries) to partner with other companies better distribute any resulting innovation.

Mode40, which works on high-end integration projects for Fortune 100 companies mostly in the U.S., will come away with its own proprietary technology that it will be free to market to other clients.

Co-founder Cameron Bergen said even though the project will take four years to complete, Mode40’s intention is to release modules of software products it will develop every six months, starting at the end of the year.

“Price is known in their industry as the leaders when it comes to quality,” Bergen said. “They expect their partners products to be at the same level. So we feel honoured to be working with them.”

Price has been talking with Mode40 for more than a year. Fediuk said in addition to the level of quality of their work, the partnership also makes sense because it aligns with Price’s corporate culture.

The project will concentrate on ways to use AI and other automation technologies to be able to better manage production of many products needed in relatively low volumes.

“We are talking about a much more efficient and effective way of scheduling,” Fediuk said. “Using Innovair’s robots will mean a much better use of our labour and improve our ability to build and get products out the door.”

Winnipeg-based Innovair Group (formerly Welders Supplies) distributes robots made by the world’s leading manufacturers: Japanese company FANUC and Swedish company ABB.

Innovair president and CEO Grant Cockshott said: “Price’s goal is to automate a whole bunch of different processes at their plant. We have done work with Price in the past on automation but have not yet sold them a robotic cell.”

Innovair said its clients use the robots for welding and material handling, a function that would be in demand at Price Industries.

The four-year project is targeting Price’s Winnipeg production facility, with an eye to roll out the technology at its other locations in Canada and U.S.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca