A Year of Challenges and Growth
It can go without saying that the year 2020 was a challenging year for anyone. From small to large businesses, from blue to white-collar workers, 2020 was a year that brought many unexpected challenges. These challenges were not only unexpected but were mostly required a significantly unique approach in facing them.
However, hard times can often be a source of perseverance. Even though Tuff Automation was considered an essential business, and was therefore allowed to remain open through both COVID-19 shutdowns, the company was still introduced to new challenges that we wouldn’t have otherwise faced.
As we look forward to 2021, we are still grateful for the accomplishments, highlights, and company firsts that 2020 brought. However, they felt a whole lot sweeter knowing that these successes came as a result of winning some hard battles. Here are a few of those accomplishments we wanted to share with you.
Our First Cobot Project
One of the most noticeable “firsts” for the company was given an opportunity to work on our first cobot project. As you probably read in our previous blog post, we partnered with a long-time customer to provide a custom quality and testing cobot cell. Even though this project is currently being worked on in our shop, and won’t be integrated until 2021, the challenge of providing a custom application like this was a welcomed challenge in 2020.
Our engineers teamed up with our sales department to provide an innovative design that our customer was unable to get anywhere else!
Mechanical Engineering
As project demand continued to increase, our need to add additional help became a priority that would inevitably bring on a few new challenges to the Tuff Automation Team. We saw a lot of this demand being put on our mechanical engineering team at the beginning of 2020. Through the first few months of the year, we were able to bring on some amazing engineers who would not only live up to the challenge of project demand but would also cause our mechanical engineering department to double in staff count.
Through 2020 we hired, trained, and saw growth from a new group of engineers that enabled us to bring in more projects than Tuff Automation has seen in the 30 years prior.
Venturing into New Industries
With the backing of our engineering team and their passion for innovative design, 2020 introduced Tuff Automation to new types of projects from a variety of different industries. We’ve now made our way into industries like wire, foam cutting, and cold storage. Being involved in projects from different industries enables us to provide unique equipment designs that are applicable and desired by a wider customer base.
Belt conveyor for handling large sections of foam
We at Tuff Automation believe that these accomplishments will launch our company into a successful 2021. However, we wouldn’t be a company without the support, loyalty, and dedication we receive from our customers. Our main customer base is unwavering from project to project. We are grateful to be working with some of the greatest companies in the world. We look forward to another great year!
Blog Posts from 2020: https://www.tuffautomation.com/blog-posts