subject: You Have Nothing to Lose But Everything to Gain By Planning For Automation and Robotics [print this page] You Have Nothing to Lose But Everything to Gain By Planning For Automation and Robotics
Taking the practical approach to setting up automation and robotics in your manufacturing operation is the best way to get your profits and production up quickly. Taking a staged approach to determine the best fit of automation and robotics for your operation should include levels of evaluation that overlap and are dependent on one another. The whole purpose of performing such scrutiny is to look first at all the automation and robotics options that could be used. Then using the requirements of your business narrow down those options to a smaller number of appropriate choices. Finally reviewing these last few options within the scope of financial returns, select the most beneficial option for implementing in your business.
The first stage of planning for automation and robotics is a very wide view of what your market place is like, what are your requirements for automation and robotics, and what are the broad constraints that your business would have. This is the stage that you must decide what is the competitive strategy of your business. This will have a direct impact on the type of automation that you will need in your business. Certain types of automation may not be supportive of some strategies. For instance, if a company requirement is to reduce product prices then automation targeted toward making custom made products would not be compatible. Examples of different types of competitive strategies might be:
- Lighter weight products
- Specialized coatings on products
- Products made from aluminum
- Products for use by hunters
These strategies obviously are tailored to the specific type of business and what its current products are.
Examples of the market place viewpoints could include:
- Improved product performance
- Reliability of product
- Quick delivery time
There can be great variation in both the strategies and the viewpoints from the market place. All of these will have to be developed with your specific business in mind. Once completed these lists should be prioritized to determine what the driving forces for your automation will be.
Having determined the requirements of the competitive strategy and the viewpoints of the market place for your products you now need to select a automation solution that will allow you to fill these strategies and viewpoints. This is where you will need the skills and experience of qualified automation solution providers. These companies can use your lists of requirements to recommend to you the types of automation that can be used to fulfill the needs described in your lists. You may want to obtain technical and operational information from more than one provider for comparison purposes. Sometimes one solution provider can offer more than one scenario of automation to fill your needs. If this is not the case then you might want to select more than one provider to offer proposals to fill your needs. By far the best situation is to have proposals submitted from at least three solution providers based on the needs of your lists. You will need the capability to rank and order the proposals that are submitted for comparison purposes. You should be able to decide on three or four proposed scenarios that should be included in final comparisons. The comparison should include simulation studies to determine accurate results. The results of the studies should include confirmation of claims made by the supplying company. Data that should be analyzed includes the overall cost of the project, implementation period, debugging period, and support abilities of the suppliers.
The final part of evaluation should be done from a financial viewpoint. The financial staff in your company should inform you of the proper net present value which can be used to discount the return from each of the possible automation scenarios. Cash flows should be calculated for each of the possible solutions over several periods. It would be wise to review variations in impacts on operations to get a true picture of the performance of each solutions. Variations in product demand, production control policies, maintenance policies, and production control policies could be used. Each of these calculated values of return on investment should be compared with what the company expects for the rate of return.
Using this type of comparison for selecting an automation solution allows for the review and selection of an optimum solution that should fully meet the needs of the business. It should make the final selection easier since each solution is evaluated at each stage on a one-to-one basis.
