What Every Fab Shop Needs to Know About Planning, Design and Execution

With ever-increasing demand on manufacturers to produce a broad array of high-quality products that remain competitive in the marketplace, the need to automate production processes has never been greater. Short product lifecycles coupled with diverse product portfolios creates a high product-mix, low-volume scenario that is increasingly driving small- and medium-sized enterprises to invest in robotic automation technologies. As production demands increase, providing hand-made solutions to a customer is becoming less viable. Automation is no longer an option - it has become a necessity.

The need to maximize the functionality of their capital investment means companies are constantly looking for ways to make systems as flexible as possible. This often is in the form of specially designed tooling and fixturing that can be changed out between production runs of different products – the so-called ‘picture-frame’ assembly, which has a permanently mounted frame inside the positioner and modular fixtures can be mounted and dismounted when required.

The true challenge arises when they need to move entire robotic cells from one area of a facility to another, or even to another facility altogether, to keep pace with the demands of an ever-changing production environment.

A modular approach

Two main driving forces behind the push to automate are increasing system throughput and maintaining consistent, high quality. Thus, most tasks performed by a robot are repetitive in nature, do not change over time, and have short cycle times in order to maximize system throughput.

Very large robotic cells and production lines involving multiple mechanical units are generally not easy to relocate to other areas in a facility or between facilities that are geographically separated.

Such a move involves many costs: labor, utilities, freight, re-installation, re-programming or re-commissioning, and operator training to name just a few. In addition, building a system to account for multiple unknowns means building in redundancy to accommodate this flexibility, which adds to the cost of the system.