Should We Upgrade Our Manufacturing With Robotic Automation?
The management of a manufacturing operation should be aware of the extra potential that robotic automation can bring to the organization
. It is important for a manufacturing organization to consider automating when the result will help the company be more profitable within the limits of the company philosophy. That is one way of saying that a company should be responsible to the employees when robotic automation will displace jobs. But on the other hand, the company has to also be responsible to the shareholders to turn a profit for the investment that has been made into the business. There may need to be adjustments made to the corporate philosophy because of the investment that has been made by shareholders. One could argue that employees have made an "investment" in a business as well. It will be up to management to balance the "investments" of these two groups when making decisions about automation.One good way of balancing these two "investment" groups is develop a list of potential processes that could be automated to create efficiency in the business. After management has created this list, a representative panel of members from both groups could be brought together to review the list. The formation of this panel should be done early in the automation process, so that both sets of members can feel some "ownership" in the process of automation. If both employees and shareholders feel that they "own" some of the process, then any problem areas that arise during the actual robotic automation process can be handled easier. The panel could be made aware of recommendations that management might be considering during the robotic automation at periodic meetings. This is not a recommendation for management by committee, but just a way for management to ease the robotic automation into the life cycle of the business.
If it has been determined that robotic automation is in the best interest of an organization, there are three steps that must be performed to achieve success in this process. First, it is very important to simplify the process that is to be automated. If the process is a single work station on an assembly line, the increments involved in performing this step must be fully scrutinized. All the unnecessary actions of this step must be eliminated. It has been determined that this process of economical scrutiny sometimes will eliminate the need of any automation. This will have to be a decision made at the completion of the analysis. If further realistic economy can be derived from automation after the scrutiny, then the automation should be completed. The process of making a production step more efficient should reduce the cost of manufacturing and make quality control more efficient. From the standpoint of manufacturing the process of making actions more efficient should yield a better understanding of how to build quality into product and better design the process.
The simplification of a manufacturing process using robotic automation should abide by four rules. This is sometimes called JIT or "Just In Time" production. The first of these rules says that nothing should be made unless it is required. Manufacturing is not done just to fill warehouses. Manufacturing is only done to directly sell the result or use the result of manufacturing as part of an assembly that will be sold. The second rule is that a part must be available when needed for production. When the manufacturing operation is running there should be parts available to keep the processes running continuously. There should be no stoppage due to parts not being available. The third rule is that all unnecessary costs must be eliminated. That is fairly evident, do not throw away money! And lastly, the quality of products produced must be improved. Implementing these practical ideas will eventually indicated where automation will further add to quality and reduce costs in the manufacturing processes.
It is a good idea to automate some simple processes first. This will help employees in learning what is involved in automation and give then insight into assisting in the implementation of more complex automation later. It is recommended that automation of a single manufacturing stage be designed so that those stages that will be automated later can be integrated easily with the other automation that is to brought on line later. It will be cheaper to integrate well designed work stations than to try to retrofit a poorly designed automated work station so that it can be integrated.
There may be automated workstations integrated with manual work stations on a production line. Each station on the line must be viewed as a discrete and independent station even though it has to be integrated into the entire manufacturing process. Flow of data from one work station to another will be handled by a computer system and its components. The type of data that is to be passed from one station to another must be defined so that the work process can be continuous.
by: John Mitchell