Would you like to build more units per month? Enhance your production flexibility to manufacture smaller product combinations in lower volumes? Factory automation can be a cost-effective ad resource-efficient solution to many of today’s complex assembly challenges.
Thanks to smarter and more dexterous robots, more lights-out manufacturing has become feasible. A growing number of plants use processes such as laser cutting and injection molding, which operate without human intervention. Additive manufacturing machines can be left to print day and night.
Manufacturing will always need people. But with the encouraging evolution of automation, new heights in productivity, quality and waste minimization are well within reach.
Automation and Lean Manufacturing
The marriage of automation and lean manufacturing marks a pathway to success in manufacturing. A common misperception is that automation builds waste and excess production. It actually streamlines processes common to previously wasteful manual lines. Automation helps implement lean concepts by:
- Facilitating standardization: This, along with related elimination of errors, is a hallmark of lean.
- Lowering expenses: Improving processes on a machine via automation can significantly reduce changeover time.
The Next Generation of Automation
Automated machines require people to set them up, service them and tell them what to do. Machine operators are increasingly becoming machine minders. And certain tasks, such as assembling components, will likely remain too fiddly for robots to do well. In essence, the right balance of robots and human innovative thinking will be the catalyst to our next manufacturing revolution.
- Throughput and yield improvements will be achieved by lowering direct worker contact with the assembly process.
- Precision robotic controls combined with automated line data monitoring will reduce process variation and virtually eliminate costly assembly errors.
- The identification and tracking of production processes and materials will enhance quality and overall plant efficiency.
- The next generation of robots will work with people, rather than replacing them. They will fetch and carry parts, hold things, pick up tools, sort items and clean up.
Given the chance, your production workers can come up with plenty of ideas to boost productivity. If they’re provided with user-friendly automation options, their contributions and successes will multiply.
To learn more about industry-related developments and utilizing them to enhance your business growth, read our related posts or contact the team at Premium Staffing today.