February 2026 Volume 8

AUTOMATION

traditionally consume skilled forge labor. Instead of large crews working in heat and hazardous conditions, a smaller group of technicians supervises automated cells. Operators are not removed from the process. They are simply repositioned. Their role shifts toward setup, tuning, diagnostics, and exception handling, rather than physical execution. The result is a forging line that behaves less like a collection of machines and more like a coherent system. And that’s the point. In an environment defined by labor scarcity and urgency, forging operations can no longer rely on effort, experience, and after-the fact fixes to hold everything together. The Macrodyne–UNION partnership shows what human automation symbiosis looks like when it’s taken seriously: a forging system designed to work with people, not wear them down. Designing for the Workforce You Actually Have Most forging plants are still designed around a workforce that no longer exists. One that’s built on perfect retention, infinite endurance and the quiet expectation that a few senior people will always make it work. That model assumes deep benches of experienced operators, long tenure, and enough slack to absorb training time, absences, and turnover without consequence. It worked when skilled labor was plentiful and careers stretched predictably over decades. Today, that assumption no longer holds. The reality on most forging floors today is far less forgiving. Teams are smaller, experience levels are uneven, and retirements are accelerating. New hires often take longer to reach full proficiency, not because they’re less capable, but because the bench of experienced mentors is thinner. In that environment, the expectation that operators will “just learn it over time” stops being a virtue and starts becoming a liability. When knowledge transfer depends on informal exposure instead of system design, every retirement, absence, or turnover event puts consistency and safety at risk. At that point, the question becomes simple: are you designing around this reality or perpetuating it? In symbiotic systems, automation is used to compress learning curves and reduce dependency on tribal knowledge. Guided setups, automated sequences, and feedback-driven controls help newer operators perform reliably sooner without waiting years to accumulate experience through trial and error. For senior forgers, the impact is equally important. Instead of carrying the operation physically and mentally, they shift into supervisory and decision-making roles. Their experience is applied to tuning processes, diagnosing drift, and training others. Not covering gaps created by fatigue or understaffing. Careers last longer. Knowledge stays in the plant. This approach also changes how risk is managed. When processes are designed to tolerate variation in staffing and experience, the operation becomes less brittle. Absences don’t cascade into shutdowns. Shift changes don’t reset quality. Just as importantly, the constant background stress eases. Leaders aren’t bracing for the next call-out. Senior operators aren’t quietly worrying about what happens if they’re not there tomorrow. The plant no longer depends on a handful of people holding everything together by force of will. It runs because the system was designed to. Simple as that. That difference is felt not just in metrics, but in the weight people stop carrying home at the end of the day.

From billet to finished shell: Jon Reiland (left), UNION Co-Founder and Head of Manufacturing, and Garrett Uncleback (right), Director of Operations, stand behind a 155 mm shell forming progression at UNION’s Factory of the Future. Rather than inheriting legacy presses and retrofitting automation around them, UNION opted for a clean-sheet design, building the forging system from the ground up. As UNION leadership has put it, “Building a factory from a clean sheet is a chance to do it right.” The objective was explicit from the start: engineer labor efficiency, consistency, and surge capacity into the system itself, instead of relying on people to compensate for equipment limitations. “Most plants don’t realize how much risk they’ve baked in by default,” says Kevin Fernandes, President of Macrodyne. “Once you accept legacy layouts and legacy workflows, you’re implicitly asking operators to absorb everything the system can’t handle. Starting clean lets us ask a different question: what should the system own, so people don’t have to?” The result is a mission-critical production line in Texas designed for automation, integration, and scale from day one. It’s not just about shell output. It’s about building capacity that can respond when it matters. UNION has pushed for modular, software-defined forging operations: systems that can be controlled, monitored and replicated through software rather than patched together from decades-old hardware. That philosophy shaped the Macrodyne-designed system at every level. This is not a conventional forge with robots added later. It is a deliberately integrated forging cell designed as a single system. Each line centers on a sequence of new hydraulic presses, each matched to a specific forming step. From raw bar to finished shell, billet cutting, heating, forging, drawing, nosing, machining, heat treatment, banding, painting, and inspection are unified within a single architecture. Presses and automation were designed together, not stitched together after the fact. Timing, motion, and control logic were aligned from the outset so the system behaves like one process instead of a series of handoffs. The system directly addresses labor, reliability, and surge constraints. Automation absorbs the repetitive, high-exposure tasks that

FIA MAGAZINE | FEBRUARY 2026 27