CAN AUTOMATION SAVE OUR MANUFACTURING?

Do you manually tend your machine tools? If so, you are in danger of losing out to a country with lower wages that manually tends similar machines. You must automate to produce more on your existing assets, improve your quality, and increase your competitiveness.

At a recent AMTDA regional meeting in Detroit, Pete Borden, the president of AMTDA, addressed some of the common misconceptions of U.S. vs. Chinese manufacturing. When the media reports about the plight of manufacturing in our country today, it typically emphasizes the plant closings and layoffs in this country and the outsourcing to low-wage countries like China and India. The general impression is that little manufacturing remains “Made in America” and the little that does will be shut down and moved off-shore.

Chinese manufacturing GDP represents a whopping $650 billion per year. It surprised me (along with many in the audience in Detroit) when Pete gave the fact that U.S. manufacturing GDP represents $1.6 trillion per year, or about two and one-half  times more than that of China! In fact, the U.S. is the world’s manufacturing leader . . . our $1.6 trillion in manufacturing alone would rank as one of the top ten largest economies in the world!

Several Chinese manufacturing plants have made recent headlines as they agree to increase worker compensation as much as 30 percent. It appears that rising salaries in China will start to erode the cost advantage as workers are less inclined to work for long hours at low pay. For now, however, there is a sizable labor cost advantage in China over our domestic plants. While we can find solace in the fact that we are still the world’s largest manufacturer, we must ask ourselves about the long-term prognoses for manufacturing in this nation.

From my perspective, a critical step in keeping our manufacturing more competitive is to aggressively consider the application of robot automation to our manufacturing systems. In my role I have the opportunity to travel and interface with robot integrators and robot end users alike. Based on this experience, I would like to propose the following five reasons for manufacturers to automate their production facilities:

(1) Increased Productivity
(2) Ability to perform secondary operations
(3) Improved Ergonomics
(4) Increased Quality
(5) Eliminate Fixtures

Please note that I left out the more obvious ROI factor of labor savings, not because its impact cannot be significant, but rather because these other savings are often overlooked even though they can be more significant than the labor savings.

INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY
Robots increase machine production by 20 percent or more. As long as a robot has raw material presented to the cell it will continue to load these materials and unload the finished product. This includes working during the morning and afternoon break periods, as well as working through lunch. Another way robots increase productivity is by reducing the chip-to-chip time with the use of a dual part gripper that operates one gripper to take out the finished part and another to place the raw part.

Some innovative job shops use an operator with the machine tool during the day shift to run customized one-of-a-kind parts. They then load up the robot to run unattended during the evening hours. This dual tasking for the machine tool can be an answer to taking the automation focus from mainly the higher volume, mass produced parts to include the smaller volume, batch production shops.

ABILITY TO PERFORM SECONDARY OPERATIONS
This step can require a paradigm change from the way manufacturers think about their process. Since modern robots typically have six servoed axes, they are “fully articulated” with the ability to position a part anywhere in the workspace with any orientation. This means the robot can pick parts from columns and rows on a tray, can perform deburring or gaging of finished parts, and can place parts to a pallet or perform an assembly operation.