subject: Get the Lead Out – Make Your Manufacturing The Best of Automated Production Systems [print this page] Get the Lead Out Make Your Manufacturing The Best of Automated Production Systems
It is a given that when the demand in the market place starts to rise for any given product, companies need to be as responsive as possible to meet the demand before their competition takes away the customers for themselves. The shortest route to getting a new product into production quickly is to set up a series of independent, manual work centers. Very low cost and small amount of effort to do this. There is also little automation here, this is not one of the automated production systems. Products and parts are moved manually from one work center to the other to get manufacturing done. The best you can say about this set up is that it will get some products into the market when the demand for them is starting to rise. This method, however, will not usually keep up with the demand on its own. If the rise in demand continues then the work centers for this production will have to be duplicated, so that more products can go out the plant door and into customers hands. It is primitive, but it is a start. This should only be the method of getting some products out in the market while thoughts of fully automated production systems turn into reality.
The next stage of moving into the automated production systems arena is to automated the individual work cells to increase the product throughput and cut down on the manual part of the process. Work-in-process will still have to be moved from one work cell to another for completion in the manufacturing. The pressure of rising demand I the market will keep the change to automation as a high priority in the company. More pressure still will cause the change to one of the fully automated production systems. This will increase the production rate even more and be able to satisfy more of the demand in the market for these goods.
Hopefully the timing of growing up to be one of the automated production systems is done so that it will meet the demands in the market as they occur. The perfect picture would be of a company that introduced its first products in the market just as the demand started and grew to each level of the automation just as the demand increased to a level to support the cost of growth. In many instances companies are able to plan for such growth into optimum production provided there is correct market information about future demand pressures. Having such knowledge will give a company the ability to meet the market at its initial demand level.
The start of production with manual work cells is the least expensive way to get into a market. This also allows a company to verify that there is a valid growing demand before investing in more expensive automation. Planned levels of demand for the products can be set as goals to start the subsequent moves to more automation. Once the demand level has reached the anticipated level, this will be the stimulus to start moving production to the next level. The support will be there to support the production change.
The initial stage of manual production will usually use manual tasks to get in-process material from one manual work cell to the next. When warranted the move to the next stage of production usually adds automation to the work cell, but continues to use manual tasks to get the work from one cell to the next. The move up to the full automation will add automated material handling capabilities to get the work-in-progress from on cell to another. As part of the plan to go through each of these stages of automation a company would also have planned for the reconfiguration of its plant. The second stage would require a different layout of the plant for to accommodate the addition of automated work cells. The third stage would require some changes in configuration to handle the addition of material handling equipment in the production area.
Since the introduction of automation is planned and introduced slowly, company personnel will be able to get the optimum engineering design in place for the move of production from one stage of automation to the next. The slow learning curve for the new product will allow production personnel to offer the best feedback about optimum changes that can be made to improve the production process as it moves from one level to the next. Having done the market research before automation, there is little chance of a company investing in automation with this approach that will not have a positive return on investment.
