February 2026 Volume 8

AUTOMATION

HOPE IS NOT AN OPERATING MODEL What Labor Shortages are Exposing About Forging, Automation and System Design By Katrina Geenevasen

Installation of one of two Macrodyne forging presses at UNION Technologies. Each fully automated line will produce 155 mm shells end-to-end, from raw steel bar to finished, painted shells, with integrated inspection and part tracking throughout the process.

F acing chronic labor shortages and rising quality demands, leading forgers are learning that the most productive plants are not ‘lights-out’. They are shops where skilled people and automation are designed to work together. Forging has never been short on orders. What it is running short on is people. U.S. manufacturers are carrying hundreds of thousands of unfilled skilled positions, and projections show the gap widening over the next decade. 1 For forging operations, where experience, judgment and physical execution intersect, the impact is especially acute. When a senior forger retires, years of process knowledge often walk right out the door with them. At the same time, customer expectations are tightening. OEMs want tighter tolerances, better documentation, improved safety records, and predictable delivery, even as plants struggle to staff shifts and maintain uptime. The result is a growing mismatch

between what the market demands and what traditional shop floor models can realistically deliver. Faced with labor shortages (the Manufacturing Institute warns the U.S. could face a shortfall of roughly 1.9 million manufacturing workers by 2033, with nearly half of the 3.8 million projected openings going unfilled), 2 some plants respond by pushing their remaining people harder, as if fatigue, risk and turnover weren’t already part of the equation. Others wait for a market correction that may never come. However, the most resilient forging operations are doing something else entirely: restructuring the work so automation carries repetition and risk, while skilled people focus on judgment and control. This is not lights-out manufacturing. It is a human-automation symbiosis. And it is fast becoming the cost of staying in the game.

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