Maquiladora Provides Work in the U.S.

Typically we read of U.S. jobs being displaced to countries like China and Mexico, which, in fact, many have. The bright side of this shift is that, in many cases, the technology required to efficiently and accurately produce components for the automotive and other industries, is still being designed and built right here in the U.S.
Case in point, Action Feed Systems design, assembly and build of an independently functioning feed and staging system for a major automotive supplier with facilities on both sides of the Rio Grande River. The manufacturer of electrical components for the automotive industry provided a location and orientation ‘in space’, where they required a plastic body to be presented to their gripper tooling. A specified cycle time was indicated and Action Feed Systems design took over. The end result was a storage hopper, vibratory feeder bowl, vibratory inline and short gravity track/dead nest (non-vibrating tooling) where the requirements for location, orientation and cycle rate was satisfactorily met. With the installation of fiber optics, the entire feed system is totally independent and refills as required in real time production.	Plastic Body Feed System
While the shift of labor intensive processes will continue to be toward lower wage locations, the U.S. can continue to be the source of high technology automation equipment and processes.