A data-center parts maker replaced all hand welding with 58 robots. Here's what happened.
Tate Inc. says a 12-times jump in per-welder output and an end to costly rework followed its shift to cloud-connected robotic welding across three U.S. factories.
Key points
- Tate Inc. Deployed 58 Hirebotics Cobot Welders across facilities in Arkansas, Virginia and Kentucky, starting in September 2023.
- The company reports a 12-times increase in per-welder throughput on critical structural assemblies after the switch.
- Hirebotics' Beacon Pro platform lets workers program and monitor robots from any smartphone or tablet, with no coding required.
- New employees typically needed only 10 to 20 minutes of training before operating the systems.
- Tate has become one of the first companies to deploy Hirebotics' newer Cobot Painter, which runs on the same platform.
Tate Inc. No longer hand-welds a single production part. The Columbia, Maryland company has supplied structural ceilings and airflow management products for data centers for 120 years, and in 2024 it decided that demand from the booming data-center industry had outpaced what its manual welding teams could safely deliver.
The answer: 58 cobot welders, a cobot being a collaborative robot arm designed to work safely alongside people on a factory floor, supplied by Nashville, Tennessee-based Hirebotics LLC. First reported by The Robot Report, the deployment spans Tate factories in three states. Robotic welding has been drawing serious investment across U.S. Manufacturing; our report on Huntington Ingalls Industries on 6 August showed a shipbuilder committing up to $900 million to the same technology.
Why did Tate pick Hirebotics over the other eight companies it looked at?
Speed of proof mattered most. When Tate brought actual parts to Hirebotics, the supplier completed live welds within 30 minutes of Tate's team walking through the door, and Tate's staff were able to programme the robots themselves before the Hirebotics team left that day.
Beacon Pro, the control software, is a no-code platform: workers issue instructions through a visual interface on a phone or tablet rather than writing any programming language. Certified programmers set exact torch angles and travel speeds once; floor operators then run those settings repeatedly without adjusting anything.
Training new operators took 10 to 20 minutes on average. "The majority of users are surprised at how quickly they can become operational with the robot," said Daniel Adams, director of sales at Hirebotics. Cobot welding programmer Jonathon Cook put it differently: "We can manipulate and curate every single weld that we make here for Tate to be exactly how it's supposed to be as by spec every single time."
What did the numbers look like after two years?
Tate reports a 12-times increase in per-welder throughput on its most critical structural assemblies. The cobots also eliminated the expensive rework that crept in when different human welders produced inconsistent results.
All three factories share weld programmes and settings in real time over the cloud, so a specification dialled in at one plant applies automatically at the others. "No production components are hand-welded anymore," Adams said.
At the Arkansas facility, the cobots handle precision pre-assembly, called tacking, before parts move to larger industrial robots further down the line, keeping production moving at a steady pace.
What happens next?
Tate's already expanding beyond welding. It's among the first to adopt Hirebotics' Cobot Painter, a robotic painting system running on the same Beacon Pro platform, so workers trained on the welders need little extra learning to use it.
For manufacturers watching from the sidelines, the practical point is this: Tate grew its certified-welder headcount at the same time as it added robots. The cobots handled volume and consistency; people handled programming and quality oversight.
Common questions
Do the robots replace welders or work alongside them?
At Tate, both happened at once. The company grew its team of certified welders while adding robots, using automation to handle repetitive high-volume work and freeing skilled staff for programming and quality oversight.
How hard is it to programme a cobot welder?
With Hirebotics' Beacon Pro software, Tate workers operated the robots after roughly 10 to 20 minutes of training. The platform uses a visual interface on a phone or tablet, so no coding background is needed.
