How do you find the time and resources to go through with your automation plans? 

Like many other manufacturers, the family-owned Johnston’s Bakery needed automation but had limited resources to bring its ambitions to life. 

Before joining the company as president of its frozen division, Pete Augustine came from a larger organization that had staff dedicated to acquiring automation solutions. In his new role, however, he was facing the task alone. 

“When I came in, the company was undergoing an expansion of a product line, and it turned out to involve a very manual process that would have required a person to catch dough in a pan and move it onto a rack all day long,” Augustine says. It wouldn’t be fair to ask a person to do that repetitive work, day in and day out. Putting in a robust automation solution instead would simplify things from all perspectives.”

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How to Automate When Time is Limited?

Although Augustine had previous experience with automation, he already had his hands full with overseeing strategy, sales and operations at the expanded frozen dough manufacturing facility in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Automating the dough panning task would require extensive preparations in scoping the project, doing market research and finding suitable vendors – further adding to his workload.

That’s when he decided to work with HowToRobot and seek assistance with the preparations. By letting HowToRobot facilitate the automation project through its platform, Augustine could take a step back and let independent experts guide the process. 

“HowToRobot’s team and platform were great to work with and hugely efficient,” Augustine says. “If we had to do all the work of finding an automation supplier and solution ourselves, it would easily have taken three to five times longer.

Planning the purchase of an automation solution involves scoping the project, describing and documenting the process in a way that potential suppliers can easily understand, and obtaining proposals from a range of suitable vendors. By relying on HowToRobot’s team and platform to facilitate these steps, Augustine minimized his efforts while speeding up the procurement process.

“After sketching out what we were looking for, HowToRobot’s team was able to come up with a scope of work, take it to market and come back with three to four opportunities in a few weeks – that was invaluable,” he says.

Where to Find Trustworthy Suppliers?

One of the challenges of looking for a new automation solution is how to find suitable suppliers that can be trusted in a short time. 

“The automation market is evolving every day, which makes it hard to keep up,” Augustine says. “There’s the fear about who you deal with. Are the larger players making the solutions more complex than you need? Can the smaller ones be trusted?”

Using HowToRobot allowed Augustine to tap into its global overview of robot and automation suppliers, covering more than 1,600 companies in the U.S. alone. This helped him quickly get in touch with a few relevant integrators.

How to Make a Decision?

Identifying a range of relevant suppliers is only one step in a longer process before a buying decision can be made. Having vendor meetings, receiving and evaluating budgetary quotes, refining the scope, and getting to a final proposal all take time and require a structured process to work efficiently.

HowToRobot facilitated budgetary quotes for Johnston’s Bakery from integrators, who all had a different approach to automating the dough-panning process. This quickly helped Augustine understand various options and price points, which he could present to the owner of the family business.