Surely you caught the recent news about a souped-up Walmart distribution center slated to open in Spartanburg County in 2024. More precisely, it will be the retailer’s largest automated grocery distribution center. There’s an economic development story about this win that the Upstate will be telling for the next decade. There’s also an interesting tech aspect that says something about what’s already here now.
The robotics and other automation technology at the center will come from Wilmington, Massachusetts-based Symbotic. But, I wondered if they could have just as easily come from here in the Upstate.
Apparently, they could.
“There’s an economic development story about this win that the Upstate will be telling for the next decade.”
We’re good at talking about our advanced manufacturing, and the dawning of Industry 4.0, the future of manufacturing. (Are we there yet?) More rare is any discussion about the companies in the Upstate whose innovations are enabling that advancement to begin with.
First, there’s Good Sense Automation, a locally-owned systems integrator that gets style points for company name. It also gets street cred for a customer base that, according to its website, includes a premier automotive manufacturer in South Carolina that is the number one exporter of vehicles in the United States (whoever that is …).
Many of the rest of our industrial robotics and automation companies are headquartered elsewhere, but have a significant presence in the Upstate.
- New York-based Calvary Robotics has a 30,000-square-foot facility in Greenville.
- Process Automation Solutions, headquartered in Germany, designs process control systems.
- JR Automation Technologies in Liberty designs, builds and integrates automation solutions as part of the Hitachi Group.
- R&E Automated Systems in Spartanburg County specializes in automation, engineering and prototype building.
This small sampling explains in part why the Greenville-Spartanburg-Mauldin metro area — and Spartanburg County, alone — have ranked in the top-10 nationally for places with the most “exposure” to robotics, yet the state only sometimes appears on lists of places where robotics and automation are a threat to workers. Most of those places are in the Rust Belt.
It seems the difference here is we’ve got a lot more skin, or maybe exoskeleton, in the game.
Jennifer Oladipo is owner of Jenno Co., which focuses on marketing and content for life science and technology companies.
