Originally featured on the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) Makers Series
Featuring: Rob Goldiez and Matt Bush, Co-Founders of Hirebotics

Rob Goldiez and Matt Bush explain how Hirebotics uses PTC’s Onshape cloud-based CAD system to power its design teams. The co-founders discuss how cloud-native tools enable their distributed team to collaborate on the next generation of cobot welding and cutting solutions.

Read more at NAM.org.

Transcript:

there’s this

massive looming shortage of welders in

north america and all over the world

really

there’s just not enough younger people

that are coming into the skilled trades

and specifically welding

and the average age of a welder in the

us is approaching

60 years old and so within the the next

few years

a lot of those people are going to be

retiring and there’s just not enough

people

to fill that high robotics is a

nashville-based company

that focuses on cloud-connected cobots

for hire thinking about manufacturers

and some of the pain points that they

face day in and day out

we provide cloud connected for hire

which is where our name comes from

for rent robotic solutions to

manufacturers

traditional robotic welders require lots

of training

on how to use it the system that we’ve

developed you run off of a mobile app

you know we’re able to program

welds an order of magnitude faster than

what you can do with the traditional

robot

literally we will pull a cell phone out

of our pocket and we’re going to show

them how

we’re going to teach that robot or that

cobot a task

from their smartphone like literally

from an app they’re downloading from the

app store

it’s not really a robot to replace

humans it’s a tool

to augment humans what we offer to our

customers is robots as a service

you know and parallels software as a

service very well

in that you know our hardware is

updatable remotely

we leverage the cloud and we do so not

just in the software that we develop

but in any tools that we look for and

look at and so we’ve been an

on-shape user longer than higher

products has been around

onshape is a cloud-based cad system that

we use to design all of our robots

we were looking for software that would

allow us to be

nimble so onshape really allowed that by

you know being able to run anywhere on

any device

when we’re on site with customers

installing systems we don’t have to

worry about bringing a print book we can

whip out a phone and pull up the model

and see it

when we need to share design reviews

with customers we’re able to invite them

into our org

and have them directly in the model with

us we take advantage of onshape

being a software as a service solution

in that we don’t need an it team

to manage infrastructure or hardware on

premises that allows us to

spend our our precious capital on other

positions within the company that are

going to help us directly grow the

business

you don’t have to worry about where our

employees are located

and you know provisioning equipment for

them you can’t put dollars on that

because

what did companies spend in a pandemic

situation trying to work from home

how much time did they lose trying to

get engineers back productive

yeah we just took our laptops home and

and went right back to work

but i think the real power is just the

collaboration features

you know it’s rare in today’s

environment that a single engineer

designs a product

the ability to put multiple people in

these models and

to build them the way that you build

them and to collaborate in real

time onshape has like a three-week

sprint cycle where they’re

constantly rolling out new features and

updates and doing that in a very

seamless way

that’s very compelling to us we can be

significantly more agile

and flexible with a system like onshape

and as we can bring more technology in

as industry 4.0 becomes a reality

as things move to more cloud-based tools

we’ll begin to be able to attract that

next generation of manufacturing workers

you know i believe america i mean we’ve

got the greatest minds that there are

and it’s just a matter of us putting our

minds to

solving the problem of how do we make

our goods here

we see the future of manufacturing as

humans and robots collaborating together

to solve problems

the ability to work in and around and

near and with cobots

and robots is exciting for a lot of

people