A Matter of Life and Tech: We’ve got the bots, y’all. – UPSTATE BUSINESS JOURNAL – Upstate Business Journal

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 retailers largest automated grocery distribution center. Theres an economic development story about this win that the Upstate will be telling for the next decade. Theres also an interesting tech aspect that says something about whats 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.

Theres an economic development story about this win that the Upstate will be telling for the next decade.

Were 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, theres 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.

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 weve 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.

Read the original here:

A Matter of Life and Tech: We've got the bots, y'all. - UPSTATE BUSINESS JOURNAL - Upstate Business Journal