I've found that whenever an industry makes a fundamental shift, businesses take a long time to properly adapt. They might jump into the deep end of the pool feet first, and only start thinking about swimming lessons as they're sinking to the bottom.
In your shop the simple mistake is that it's no longer a "welding shop", it's a robotics shop that happens to do welding. Robot maintenance is a thing, and it's a different specialisation to welding, even if the robot is doing welding.
In the IT space, I see this with the public cloud. It's not just someone else's data centre that you're renting. It's a dev-sec-ops integrated platform, basically a new "distributed operating system" that needs an entirely different bag of tools, training, and even corporate structure to support.
Just this morning someone form a legacy "DBA" team asked me: "Where do I go to add a new user to the database?"
Err...
That's not a click-ops task any more. She would have to know how to use Git, a JSON templating language, PowerShell, and know about PaaS configuration automation via deployment pipelines.
The cloud is no longer managed by teams like Networks + DBAs + Sysops! It is now site reliability engineers (SREs) that handle most of those cross-cutting concerns. The entire IT department of that enterprise needs to be restructured and their staff retrained (or made redundant!) to manage a public cloud.
In your shop the simple mistake is that it's no longer a "welding shop", it's a robotics shop that happens to do welding. Robot maintenance is a thing, and it's a different specialisation to welding, even if the robot is doing welding.
In the IT space, I see this with the public cloud. It's not just someone else's data centre that you're renting. It's a dev-sec-ops integrated platform, basically a new "distributed operating system" that needs an entirely different bag of tools, training, and even corporate structure to support.
Just this morning someone form a legacy "DBA" team asked me: "Where do I go to add a new user to the database?"
Err...
That's not a click-ops task any more. She would have to know how to use Git, a JSON templating language, PowerShell, and know about PaaS configuration automation via deployment pipelines.
The cloud is no longer managed by teams like Networks + DBAs + Sysops! It is now site reliability engineers (SREs) that handle most of those cross-cutting concerns. The entire IT department of that enterprise needs to be restructured and their staff retrained (or made redundant!) to manage a public cloud.
You workshop probably needs the same approach.