A New Approach to Manufacturing Automation

Manufacturing, which is an admittedly generic, catch-all term used to describe a very varied set of activties performed by firms, has traditionally led the way in automation. In areas where creative, flexible human resources were being applied to very mundane, repetitive tasks, mechanization and automation were long ago realized to offer significant advantages in terms of cost and human asset utilization-if a machine is now pasting the label on the soup can, the soup can lid paster can be retrained to something else.

Indeed, this type of thinking is part of what ushered in the Industrial Revolution a century and a half ago. However, kDy believes that the level and type of automation applied to manufacturing have not kept up with the latest automation technologies available.

Consider the following:

• Machine vision is faster and more capable than ever of performing complex measurements and evalutations of completed parts. Especially in environments with low overall defect rates and high throughputs, human inspectors can easily become mesmerized and pass defective parts. Automation can drastically slash these error rates. Also, the inspection process becomes infinitely more repeatable-the first shift will perform exactly the same as the third shift, because the machine works all three shifts!
• Articulated robots are great for assembly, set-up, and pick and place tasks, not to mention welding, soldering, and the like. While many industries have embraced these types of robots, programming them often requires special skills and training. This increases set-up time, which hurts the bottom line. Imagine if an operator on the floor could more easily program new parts and processes. This would be a boon, especially to shorter-run, build- or engineer-to-order job shop environments.
• Combining automation technologies is a great way to multiply cost savings. For example, imagine if this robot included a machine vision camera that allowed it to check the alignment of the parts it was handling, or inspect them when it was done. Imagine if it was mounted next to the CNC machine that an operator currently has to load and unload. Never mind that the CNC machine needs someone to press the button to start the cycle. We have ways of dealing with that.

kDy Automation Solutions invites you to use your imagination. Your process is unique, and we would like to use our imagination to bring a higher level of automation into your plant. Call us so we can do an old-fashioned time-and-motion study in your plant, and bring some cutting edge technology in when we're done.