Improving
Product Quality with Flexible Automation & Software
With recalls taking center stage in today’s media, manufacturers
must closely evaluate the cost of poor quality (CoPQ) to their
business. CoPQ is typically defined as the costs that would disappear
if your manufacturing process was perfect. These costs include
lost goodwill and expenses incurred from replacement, refund,
rework, and scrapping. It has been estimated that CoPQ amounts
to approximately 5-30 percent of a manufacturer’s gross
sales. This means CoPQ is costing manufacturers millions per
year and therefore every executive should recognize that quality
must be addressed to remain competitive. In industries where
the price of product is the most prevailing factor, quality
can be a significant differentiator and can either help or
hurt your
reputation as a manufacturer.
There is a common perception that improving the quality of
products being produced can be a costly endeavor. And because
of the pressure
to shrink budgets and maximize the value of systems already
in place, it is often an area overlooked in favor of getting
product
out the door. Flexible automation and intelligent automation
systems are tools manufacturers consider adopting to increase
production, streamline their processes and cut costs, but there
remains the perception that implementing automation is cost
prohibitive. However, when improved quality is included in
the analysis, the
return on investment associated with flexible automation frequently
meets corporate hurdle rates.
Expense of Automating
Probably the most stated reason given for a manufacturer’s
hesitation in investing in automation is cost Many manufacturers
claim robots are just too expensive. In the short run, it may
seem too expensive to adopt new methods to increase the quality
of the products you produce. But in order to remain competitive,
you must look past the near-term expense and conceptualize ways
to design a system that delivers products with quality assured.
Although the cost of a robot isn’t insignificant when factoring
in the total cost of manual labor, you find that in actuality
automation is generally more cost effective and efficient.
Consider the cost of one employee. You have salary, benefits,
training costs, worker’s compensation, vacation, sick time
and of course employees are limited to how long they can work
during a shift. Coupled with the fact that automation can run
24/7, manufacturers find that their production increases and
in most cases they see a return on investment in less than two
years.
“
It is important to note too that the cost of automation over
the last 10 years has dropped significantly,” says Mark
Beatty, automation project manager at Mecano Industrie Inc. of
Quebec, Canada a leading robotics integrator. “This coupled
with the availability of new pre-engineered software, the ability
to provide plug and play systems and pre-delivery testing of
systems prior to installation at the customer’s site all
reduces the implementation cost of automation.”
“
When considering the “total cost of ownership” or
the life of the product they’re building and selling manufacturers
should also consider that automating their systems domestically
may be less expensive than incurring the high costs of poor quality
and the rising costs of shipping products to and from off shore
facilities,” said Mike Koziel vice president of sales for
Eagle Technologies a Michigan based automation systems provider. “We
believe that in the long run automation, especially “flexible
automation”, will not only lower manufacturers’ overall
costs but building their products domestically will help restore
the United States to the manufacturing power it once was. And
that will be good for all of us in many ways.”
Flexible robotics can improve product quality
Improving Sanitation
According to the Centre for Disease and Control and
Prevention, approximately 70% of all food borne
disease is due to
viruses spread by direct or indirect contact with
infected individuals.
The less contact employees have with products,
particularly consumable products, the better. Not only does
this
ensure the delivery
of safe foods to the consumer it saves the manufacturers
and packagers exorbitant cost of product recalls
and the demise
of a company’s reputation. Automating the
handling of products will naturally help reduce
the human contact equation and reduce
incidents of contamination. Where efforts are made
to quantify the real and potential costs associated
with the many forms of
poor sanitation, a reduction of contamination will
frequently outweigh the savings associated with
the labor reduction itself.
Improving Inspection
All reputable manufacturers have some type of quality
inspection program for their production lines.
A typical manual inspection
process uses employees visually inspecting small
groups of products off line. This proves to be
error prone
by virtue
of the fact
that humans are just that, human. They can be
easily distracted and their inspection criteria are subjective.
This coupled
with the fact that they cannot inspect every
piece
makes the system
slow and inaccurate. According to a report by
the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics continued
improvements
in technologies,
including the introduction of flexible automation
allow firms to automate inspection tasks, increasing
the
productivity of their workforce and reducing
the demand for inspectors.
Flexible
automation in combination with machine vision
can improve the inspection process significantly by inspecting
product earlier
in the production process. Robotics with machine
vision
can
consistently inspect every product with the same
criteria every time. This
method eliminates human error, is extremely fast
and repeatable and can be measured and reported
immediately
for analysis.
“
Vision systems can be a key analytical tool for quality teams,” said
Scott Klimczak president of CHAD Industries. “Not
only does an automation inspection process
track pass or fail parts
but it can also track failure modes. An analysis
of a group of similar failures can lead to
uncovering issues in the manufacturing
process either on site or from a vendor.”
These advantages and the fact that machine
vision systems are more cost effective
than ever makes
automated inspection
an
attractive solution for manufacturers,
and provides a key advantage for
quality improvements. An automated process
improves quality by rejecting bad product
early and can
be adjusted in-line
to keep
products within quality specifications
without disrupting the entire process line. For high
value products
this also improves
equipment utilization as value is not added
to products which could have been detected
up stream.
Reducing Bad Parts & Increasing Consistency
Tedious tasks such as picking and placing
products into packaging are prone to
error when manual
labor is used.
Human error
can increase the number of bad parts
just by virtue of the fact
that employees tire more easily, require
breaks, cannot repetitively inspect each
part and so
on. Automation
can accomplish precision-based
tasks faster, more efficiently and with
consistent repeatability. Robots are
designed around
the principles of precision
and repeatability.
For repetitive tasks, which are areas
most susceptible to human error, robots provide
superior performance,
endurance, and
precision To replicate a task, a robot
need only be trained once through
a programming interface then a reliable
and consistent process
can be achieved.
Speeding Production
It doesn’t take a leap of faith or a calculator to conclude
that the higher your production rate the lower your cost per
unit will be. After all if you can make twice as many widgets
as your competitor in the same amount of time and/or floor space
your advantage is obvious. Lowering your fixed costs, including
factory floor space, power, and other types of overhead is achieved
by ramping up yield, so those costs are spread over a greater
amount of output. For this to be achieved, speed remains automation
customer’s most pressing
requirement. Often when the focus
is placed solely
on getting product
out the door however, quality
can be overlooked.
Manufacturers who want to remain competitive need to consider
avenues that will allow them to increase production and production
speed without compromising quality. Robots can do the things
that are tedious, difficult, or unsafe for humans without worry
about the humans skipping parts, not assembling them correctly,
suffering repetitive-stress injuries, and many other problems
that slow production down and increase the costs of manufacturing.
With a flexible automation application in place it can assemble
the parts 24/7 if needed and not miss a beat or produce bad parts.
Improving safety
According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational
Safety and Health Administraion businesses spend $170 billion
a year on costs associated with occupational injuries and
illnesses. They further cite that workplaces that establish
safety and health
management systems can reduce their injury and illness costs
by 20 to 40 percent which can mean the difference between
operating in the black and running in the red.
Manufacturers looking to improve quality and safety can take
a lesson from the auto industry. As an example, automating
the painting process of automobiles has taken the employees
out of
poor working conditions where they were exposed to hazardous
fumes and provided a much more consistent painting application.
Automobile painting by robots provides far superior quality.
Another example is the reduction in repetitive stress disorders
in employees. Relieving employees from tedious assembly
lines with automation reduces the incidents of injury and
increases
the quality of assembly by using robots that consistently
perform the same tasks the same way each and every time.
Automation Software Improving Quality
Understanding the value of flexible automation on quality is
fairly straight forward and easily conceptualized. Deploying
it is a whole different consideration. Manufacturers looking
to improve quality with flexible automation may not have the
resources to build complex automated manufacturing processes
that require multiple robots, controllers, conveyors, cameras,
etc. Getting from concept to production requires designing, writing
and debugging many thousands of lines of code. That’s where
automation software comes in. Newly developed automation software
brings all the benefits of flexible automation, including improved
quality, to users who would not have the resources to build these
complex applications in a fraction of the time it would normally
take.
Intuitive automation software featuring integrated point and
click capability can effectively deploy applications without
lengthy, overly complicated programming. Software tools and
functionality are now available to rapidly integrate an entire
robot line from
concept to a fully-operational system. Automation software
makes it easy to entirely configure, program, and manage
single and
multi-robot systems (including mixed systems), conveyors, feeders,
vision, and device IO assignments, without seeing anything
other than a user-friendly, PC-based interface. Automation
software
can be additionally enhanced to incorporate vision-guided and
inspection applications and customized for deployment of for
example packaging applications. By having a means to easily
deploy flexible automation for manufacturing applications,
and reassigning
employees to more complex tasks, manufacturers can significantly
improve product quality.
Previous incarnations of automation software provided programming
functionality but saw each robot cell as an "island" of
automation. While being able to control robots and peripheral
automation equipment very well, it was not interfaced to upstream
or downstream robot cells, so for example functions such as dynamically
allocating product to specific robot cells required advanced
programming. New software based on a .NET platform opens up the
software architecture enabling the "application layer" to
take on more of a supervisory role in controlling a whole line
of robot cells. Today’s software can connect to all robot
cells and allocate parts to each one dynamically. If, for some
reason one cell cannot process a part, it gets handed back to
the software, which allocates it to the next available robot.
Now not only has product-handling ability been moved up to the
software, but product data as well.
Now, new automation software has access to all production
data. If a part or assembly is inspected somewhere along
a production
line, it has knowledge of the inspection results and can
decide how to process that part. Additionally, it can tie
directly
into a factory MIS system (using built-in technology such
as OPC [Object
Linking and Embedding for Process Control]) and instantaneously
update product quality information. These techniques can
also keep track of product/batch information. So, in the
unlikely
event of a recall manufacturers will know where that particular
product originated and where in its lifecycle things went
wrong providing the traceability demanded by an increasing
number
of industries.
Conclusion
Manufacturers can improve quality using flexible automation
by improving sanitation, safety & inspection while
speeding production, reducing bad parts and increasing
consistency. Precise
and repeatable robots coupled with new powerful all-in-one
automation software which simplifies automation deployment
can deliver a
complete system to help manufacturers produce high
quality products, protecting their image and thus resulting
in increased levels
of business.
Company info:
Adept Technology, Inc. is a leading provider of intelligent
vision-guided robotics and global robotics services
including linear, SCARA,
six-Axis or delta type robots, Adept ACE & Adept
PackXpert automation all-in-one software solutions.
www.adept.com.
CHAD Industries was founded in 1973 as a design and
manufacturing company specializing in custom automation.
www.chadindustries.com.
Eagle Technologies was founded in 1995 and is a
leading automation systems provider. www.eagletechnologies.com.
Mecano Industrie Inc. of Quebec, Canada is a
leading robotics integrator and provider of
quality robotic
systems meeting
ISO 9001 international requirements. www.mecanoindustrie.com.
For
more information on automated material handling, call 714-938-0080,
visit http://www.chadindustries.net or
eInquiry 3.
