One of China’s first unmanned factories in the city of Dongguan recently replaced 590 of its workers with robots and the results were astounding. While the factory used to be run by 650 employees, only 60 of those people still work at the factory and their primary job is to make sure the machines are running properly, not working on manufacturing.
Since the shift to robots, pieces per person per month has risen from 8,000 to 21,000—a whopping 250% increase. While some may argue that quality of the product will decrease with the use of robots, this doesn’t appear to be the case either. The number of product defects has decreased from 25% to just 5%.
So the old useful-output production per month was 650 * 8000 * 0.75 = 3900000 pieces. Now it's 60 * 21000 * 0.95 = 1197000.
Useful output in pieces per month is now only 31% of what it used to be. The much lower defect rate might save a lot of money, but I wonder if profits actually improved following such a dramatic output reduction, even considering savings on wages and defective parts.