Small and medium-sized manufacturers in Virginia are gaining another resource to help them traverse technological changes thanks to a federal grant and a local consultant.
Martinsville-based GENEDGE is spinning up a two-year Virginia Smart Manufacturing Accelerator program to help companies improve their efficiency through new technologies and better use of their existing equipment. The program is backed by a $2 million U.S. Department of Energy grant plus $600,000 from GENEDGE’s own budget.
The organization has a goal of seeing 80 Virginia companies achieve a combined $20 million in “impact” through April 2026. An example of impact could be when a company saves money by adding digital sensors to an existing machine to get more productivity out of it rather than buying a brand-new machine.
“The world is moving so fast in the technologies. And if you believe that you can put it off another day or keep waiting, you’re in trouble,” said Jeff Shook, GENEDGE’s advanced manufacturing manager and the program manager for the accelerator effort.
“We want our manufacturing to be competitive and profitable with not only U.S. manufacturers but China and these other places. And how do you do that? You do it more efficiently.”
Program aims to demystify ‘smart’ tech
Through the Virginia Smart Manufacturing Accelerator program, GENEDGE and its partners will offer consulting services, technical webinars, hands-on workshops and a workforce development curriculum for trade schools and community colleges.
Those partners include Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia State University, Old Dominion University’s Virginia Digital Maritime Center, the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing, state community colleges and several state agencies.
The accelerator was one of 12 projects to receive a DOE grant to boost adoption of smart manufacturing. The federal agency is interested, Shook said, largely because running equipment more efficiently means less energy usage.
The accelerator program kicked off in April and GENEDGE announced its official launch last month.
GENEDGE is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s network of manufacturing extension partnerships, or MEPs, which help small- and medium-sized manufacturers grow. There are MEP centers in each U.S. state and Puerto Rico; GENEDGE is the only one in Virginia.
One goal of the Virginia Smart Manufacturing Accelerator, Shook said, is to help companies understand that despite the prevalence of terms like “smart manufacturing” or “Industry 4.0” to describe the increasing digitization of manufacturing, many technological improvements don’t have to be difficult or expensive.
“It may be the quickest way to get that maximized savings is to help manufacturers identify where’s the greatest use of energy in your facility and what you can do with it to save money,” Shook said.
Another example of a potential improvement, Shook said, comes from the fact that many smaller companies record their production activities on paper and enter it into a computer system later. That lag time could be reduced by adding a sensor to a machine to more quickly collect data about its output.
Eventually, manufacturers could integrate artificial intelligence and other high-powered computing to identify production problems or maintenance needs that human employees might not notice.
“So you use AI tools, they will tell you that a machine or process might be going out of control or unstable, or it’s time to, you know, change the oil, so to speak,” Shook said.
New effort builds on existing work
While the smart manufacturing program is new, it has some elements of services that GENEDGE already offers.
An example of a GENEDGE client is Lawrence Brothers Inc., a heavy metal fabrication company based in the Tazewell County town of Bluefield. Near the end of 2022, GENEDGE began working with the company to improve its processes in a workforce world changed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Each week, Lawrence Brothers produces about 1,200 boxes to house batteries on electric utility vehicles such as forklifts and airport support trucks, said company president Melanie Protti-Lawrence.
GENEDGE brought in a consultant who showed Lawrence Brothers ways to be more efficient, such as by handling parts and products less often during manufacturing, Protti-Lawrence said.
From that consulting relationship also came a partnership between Lawrence Brothers and a California-based robotics firm.
Lawrence Brothers now has a custom-made robotic arm that sands down the sides of the metal battery boxes before a powder-coat finish is applied. Automating that step has helped improve the company’s bottom line and reduced workplace injuries, Protti-Lawrence said.
Lawrence Brothers is preparing to deploy another robot to sand the battery boxes’ corners and is working with GENEDGE on adding “co-bots” — robots that work alongside humans — to its workflow.
“I don’t know that I can say that we would not have gone into automation and technology upgrades without GENEDGE, but we certainly would not have been able to do it as quickly and as effectively as we have been with some of the programs that they offer,” Protti-Lawrence said.
