High-mix, low-volume manufacturing (HMVM) is one of the most powerful engines of the British economy; and one of the quietest. While the headlines often go to mass-production sectors—automotive, aerospace, consumer electronics— 90% of all manufacturing firms in the country are small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs).
That’s 250,000 different organisations - each forms part of the backbone of industries like MedTech, aerospace, defence, composites and more. These are not 10-million-units-per-year factories. These are the firms producing 500,5,000 or 50,000 units at extreme levels of precision and reliability. These are firms that take advantage of one of the few USPs left in the national economy: our world leading research institutions.
It’s the space where innovation happens fast, where customer needs change rapidly, and where engineering skill—not just scale—defines success. But, despite its importance, HMVM has been underserved by mainstream automation technologies. Traditional automation excels at doing one thing, very fast, for a very long time. It prefers stability, repeatability, and high throughput. HMVM is the opposite.
It demands:
- Frequent changeovers
- Small batches
- Manual dexterity
- Flexible tooling
- Deep process
- Knowledge low
- Downtime tolerance
- ROI that must make sense at small scale
So to a long-standing problem: most HMVM businesses want automation, but the automation on the market wasn’t built for them. As a result, the UK has thousands of skilled operators performing tasks that could be automated—if the automation was designed for their reality, not for Detroit-style volume. Happily, a new wave of automation is changing that. Across the industry, a shift is finally happening.
What defines this new wave?
1. Flexibility first, not throughput first Automation that can switch between tasks, product variants, or fixtures without weeks of reprogramming.
2. Faster deployment and lower integration friction Robotic cells or modular systems designed to be installed in hours or days—not months.
3. Built-in perception and intelligence Vision systems, adaptive algorithms, and simulation tools that allow robots to behave more like skilled operators.
4. Scalable investment, realistic ROI Automation that makes financial sense even at 1,000units/day, not just 100,000.
5. A focus on error-proofing, quality and consistency
For HMVM, accuracy and repeatable quality often matter more than speed. The future of British manufacturing will not be won by mega-factories—it will be won by making small and mid-sized manufacturers radically more productive, more consistent, and more competitive through accessible automation. Poka-Yoke’s mission has always been to make no mistake — to engineer out the error, the waste, the inefficiency. Applied to HMVM, that philosophy becomes a powerful enabler of the next generation of British manufacturing.
And with a new wave of flexible automation technologies emerging, the timing has never been better.