Inside MRC's 2026 Automation and Manufacturing Technology Show

The Manufacturers Resource Center runs its Automation and Manufacturing Technology Show as a half-day event built for small and mid-sized manufacturers. You get breakfast, case studies from manufacturers who have actually done the work, and an expo floor full of robots, vision systems and data tools you can walk up to and try for yourself. The 2026 show ran the morning of Wednesday, April 15, at the Delta Hotel by Marriott in Breinigsville, and it was the fourth year in a row we covered it for MRC.

Our crew and what we delivered

We ran the show with three people, one on photo and two on video. The video side worked off tripods for the program with dedicated audio, picked up b-roll of every demo on the floor, and set up a sit-down interview spot next to the MRC banner in a quiet corner of the hotel. Photo covered everything else, from the hotel exterior and the breakfast line to the last conversations at the vendor tables.

MRC had 202 edited photos the same day, split between the program and a full set of vendor tables, so every exhibitor had photos of its own booth to post, and the highlight film and interview pieces followed after that.

The speakers

MRC's Shawn Furman opened the morning, and his point, as MRC summed it up afterward, was that the manufacturers seeing real results from automation aren't the ones doing the most, and that the best projects are "built with employees, not deployed to them." After that, three manufacturers walked through their own projects. Kevin Wadiak explained how Just Born moved from paper tracking to real-time visibility with a manufacturing execution system, Danielle Hess of Highwood USA made the case for starting small with high-volume, repeatable processes and safety wins before scaling up, and Andrew Buczewski of Viwinco laid out a practical approach he calls Lean AI.

The speakers finished on a panel with Shawn moderating and questions from the room, which is where we got some of our favorite frames of the morning, with people standing up holding a mic and asking about their own shop floors.

The expo floor

Between sessions everybody moved out to the expo floor, where Neff had a Kawasaki robot arm in an enclosure rearranging dominoes, a collaborative welding robot was running demos, there were automation cells you could put your hands on, and MRC set up its own lean lab with stations under signs reading Respect People, Think Lean and Improve Every Day. WFMZ's Sydney Kay was there for 69 News and interviewed Shawn on the floor, where he said MRC wants people to leave with "networking and connections to reach out to if they have an idea."

Interviews from the show

Along with the highlight film, we produced three short interview pieces with people from the show, each about two and a half minutes, recorded at our interview setup down the hall from the ballroom. They let attendees and exhibitors tell you in their own words why they showed up, which a recap never really does.

Our fourth year at the show

This was our fourth AMT Show, and covering the same event year after year really pays off. By now we know the room, where the good light is and which demos are going to pull a crowd, and MRC has four years of photos and footage to pull from every time it needs to sell the next show.

Shawn was back on stage in October with a keynote on AI at the Lehigh Valley Manufacturing Forum at SteelStacks, and we were there for that one too.

Later · Bethlehem · October 1, 2026Inside the 2026 Lehigh Valley Manufacturing Forum

Thanks to Shawn Furman, Diane Lewis and the MRC team for having us back for year four, and to all the exhibitors who let us film their demos.

Speaker details and quotes via MRC, MRC's show announcement and WFMZ 69 News. Photos, highlight film and interviews by TM Productions.