Dubois had prior manufacturing experience with robotics and trusted the technology in a general sense. One of the two brothers that run Fabridor parent company Cabcor Industries did not.

“He is really not keen on new technology. He likes to buy machines that have proven themselves, not really anything that is new or specifically made for a specific task, like we [needed]. So, I had a lot of convincing to do with him,” says Dubois.

Fabridor is a high mix/low yield job shop, which made ROI projections difficult. Dubois predicated the pitch on saving one position per shift by switching to automation. Deploying a pair of sanding robots would cost a little less than $288,000 when in the past five years Fabridor had posted 5% profit annually off about $5 million in gross income. The robots represented a significant financial risk.

Faith in Dubois’s judgement ultimately led to approval of the PO.

“They’d been trying to hire me for a few years, so they knew what I was capable of doing from the get-go. When I decided to come work with them, I also had their agreement [that] they were going to trust me. …  I had to [play] that card…because one of the CEOs didn’t really believe robotics was a good solution. It was a risky solution,” says Dubois.

Where he had based his executive pitch substantially on trust, Dubois couldn’t afford to leave the success of the project to faith.

“We found that the most important thing was … the will of the integrator to work on a sanding pattern that would imitate what we’re able to do by hand. That was the most complex part of everything. … We’re sanding MDF. It cannot just be sanded with a flat pattern. We had to come up with an oscillating pattern that doesn’t leave marks,” says Dubois.

The first integrator he investigated didn’t actually have a solution. They were looking to fund research. He then investigated a Canadian manufacturer that specialized in medical robotics but wanted to branch into industrial applications. During the investigation process with Fabridor, they decided that making the jump into a new sector was too expensive.

Finally, after two years of searching, in September 2023 Dubois discovered automation integrator Vention.

Three weeks after our first meeting they came here, they looked at our operation and how we were doing the sanding. I mean, they sure benefited from the work we have done with the previous integrator, because we told them the mistakes we had gone through.And three weeks after that, they were ready for us to go and see a demo,” he says. Fabridor signed the PO early this year.