A Ukrainian drone maker says too much factory automation can be a weakness in a fast-changing war

• Ukraine’s battlefield is changing so rapidly that weapons manufacturers must constantly adapt.

• One drone manufacturer said manual assembly is key to making quick updates.

• The company said too much automation could mean “product release freezing.”

A Ukrainian drone manufacturer says it is keeping up with technology Rapidly changing battlefield Some of its jobs require manual assembly rather than relying solely on large machines.

Ukraine’s needs large quantities of weapons As quickly as possible, this is a demand that often pushes companies towards automation. But these weapons need to be updated as Ukraine’s war changes; This is something that too much automation can make difficult.

Frontline Robotics, produces drones and weapons The company, used by more than 60 Ukrainian units, is forced to make minor changes to its products up to 20 times a month and major updates approximately every six months to maintain its edge.

Business development chief Mykyta Rozhkov told Business Insider: innovate at this pace does not rely heavily on automated processes.

Huge fixed processes aren’t working because of “the amount of changes we make every month.” Instead, procedures need to be “light but still stable so that 20 changes per month can be sustained.”

This includes some work done without machines, which gives the company greater agility. “The majority of assembly lines rely on manual assembly because manual assembly is the most flexible,” Rozhkov said.

“Automation brings with it the cost of freezing the product version,” he said. A fully automated production system means a company can produce large quantities efficiently, but “what do you do if you have to make a lot of changes?”

he said sustaining this pace of change “It’s not an easy task, to be honest,” because everything from the supply chain to quality control still needs to continue to operate to a high standard.

“So everything is constantly moving, and keeping it all together requires a new approach.”

“In our case, we found a pretty good balance between automation and flexible manual assembly to consistently deliver the updated product every month,” Rozhkov said.

It also has another advantage. Ukraine’s arms manufacturers work under the constant threat of attack, and the destruction of a large machine could harm production. “The big machine, you can’t trust it if you can lose it at any time,” he said.

The battlefield in Ukraine is changing so quickly that soldiers and weapons manufacturers say weapons could become outdated within weeks. Taras Berezovets, head of the military cooperation department of the Ukrainian Regional Defense Forces, called it a war in which “what seems to be the most advanced technology will be completely out of date after one, maximum two months.”

Frontline and other Ukrainian companies say constant feedback from soldiers, including FaceTime, helps them stay up to date.

The company is in constant communication with the soldiers who use its equipment, Rozhkov said, so “we don’t even have to ask them for feedback. It goes straight to our inbox 24/7.”

The need to update products so quickly also affects other companies operating in Ukraine. find new processes This includes designing systems from scratch so they can be upgraded quickly.

The pace of change on Ukraine’s battlefield is the kind of pace Western leaders worry future wars might be at, and they want to learn from how quickly Ukraine can build and innovate.

Officials at NATO now view the speed of building and purchasing weapons as crucial, even if it sometimes exceeds the quality of certain equipment. Western armies want piles of weapons systems that allow them to more easily upgrade these weapons as quickly as possible and as conflicts evolve.

Western leaders say Ukraine has the army and industry they have I need to learn speed from.

Tarja Jaakkola, NATO’s deputy secretary general for defense industry, innovation and armaments, said recently that NATO is trying to learn as much as possible from the pace of Ukraine’s weapons development, including from Western companies working with Ukrainian counterparts. The goal is to “understand Ukraine’s industrial capacity, the technology they have, and also the innovation that is happening in Ukraine right now.”

Speaking at a drone summit attended by Business Insider in Latvia, he said: “We are truly grateful and grateful to Ukraine for how they transferred the knowledge they gained during this terrible war to the alliance.”

NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, Sir John Stringer, said at the same event that the West’s needs to move much faster and “get comfortable with buying cycles that are faster than we were taught.” Talent development needs to happen “over weeks and months, not just years and decades” as in Ukraine.

The West is now “in a race,” he said.

It means “what, how, where and when production will change.”

Frontline still wants some automation and wants it to work as efficiently as possible. Combining Frontline’s battlefield experience with Quantum’s manufacturing expertise, it is working with German unmanned aerial systems company Quantum Systems to produce Frontline’s Ukrainian-designed unmanned aerial vehicles for Ukraine in Germany.

“The basic idea is to create a blend of two production cultures to get the best of both worlds,” Rozhkov said.

He described it as “a two-way street, honestly.” We learn a lot from German manufacturing approaches, including automation expertise.

He said both sides had much to teach each other, with Germany bringing decades of expertise and Ukraine bringing new insight on how to act quickly and at scale in wartime. “The European industrial complex industry is strong, efficient, but has its own legacy. And in a sense, in Ukraine, we have the freedom to create it from scratch.”

The key for Frontline, he said, was “to maintain our core identity of being as flexible as possible, even in Germany.”

It is one of many Ukrainian companies now working with Western counterparts, and both parties say they have a lot to learn from each other, from processes to innovative technology. Other European countries in particular say they want their industries to learn by working directly with Ukrainian companies.

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