Automation in manufacturing shows no signs of slowing down. Recent figures show year-on-year growth of around 9%.
So how does this affect your business? Are you ready for this shift in your manufacturing industry?
Automation and robotics are two broad and complex creatures, so getting your business ready takes some planning.
If you're new to automation, it pays to understand how this technology can transform your workplace. To help you on your journey, we've outlined some of the key benefits of automation.
Streamlining Processes
Every manufacturing organization has established processes, but they are not always 100% effective.
Even in the most competitive organizations, there's always room for improvement to reduce waste, cut steps and speed things up.
This is where automation becomes an asset. For example, you can improve and automate machines to turn a ten-step manufacturing process into a three-step manufacturing process. In doing so, you can also reduce the number of human steps in the manufacturing process that naturally slow things down.
Of course, machines replacing humans is nothing new, and some of the world's leading companies (automakers, for example) have succeeded this way.
But today, we also have robotics that add another dimension to automated manufacturing. When you add AI (artificial intelligence) to automation, the potential becomes even more exciting. This, in turn, enables employees to upskill and take on more valuable tasks in the workplace.
For example, robots in manufacturing can take on quality inspection tasks. This replaces someone manually checking each product on the production line.
More Consistent Results
By implementing automation and robotics, you can reduce the chances of human error in your manufacturing process.
By switching from manual to automated, you'll get more consistent results at every critical point in the manufacturing process, including faster setup, assembly, tracking, and quality control.
Automation helps ensure that every step in your manufacturing process is the same, and by doing so, you're more likely to get similar outputs.
Maintaining this consistency is crucial when you want to grow your business. It's what customers expect when they see your product advertised on a website or in a store.
Reducing Costs
You've probably done a lot to cut costs in your manufacturing process. In this case, you may be considering how automation can help you achieve these goals.
For starters, higher productivity and more efficient automated processes will lead to lower costs, and the more work you do to improve your processes through automation, the more you'll notice a difference in long-term manufacturing costs.
This helps you increase profitability, lower product prices, and become more competitive.
If you use robotics and automation to monitor your manufacturing processes, you can help reduce downtime or machine breakdowns, both of which can cost you additional lost production and repair costs. Control systems can now provide predictive maintenance and continuously monitor machines and equipment. As a result, this can reduce the amount of time automated machines are offline, as fixes will be focused on highlighted areas retrieved from the machine's big data.
In addition to automated manufacturing, you can also reduce warehousing costs by using automated machines such as smart warehouses and by self-driving vehicles to manage your inventory and internal logistics, which can also save you money on costly wider logistics setups.
Automation investments can be expensive for fully automated production lines but should be implemented for both short and long term gains. Looking at the bigger picture, with proper planning, automation can be implemented in phases, thereby spreading the costs while still improving production and quality.
Better product quality
Continuously improving the quality of your product design and development is how you innovate and stay one step ahead of the competition. Automation can help you achieve this.
Automation and robotic systems can help you identify and fix defects in your processes or products, paving the way for improved quality.
Technologies such as sensors and vision systems will help find defects, and you can use advanced analytics to help pick out products or parts of processes that need quality improvements.
Automation and robotics can also help you produce consistent results that can significantly impact product quality. This means that customers will associate your company with high quality standards; a great way to set yourself apart.
And of course, it means you'll also receive fewer customer complaints or product returns, which reduces your costs.
Reducing manual labor
Employee payroll is probably one of your highest business expenses. In addition to payroll, you have to pay for your HR team, recruiting, and benefits. So you want to make sure you're using all that brainpower as wisely as possible.
When you help reduce manual repetitive tasks for your employees, you free up that talent for things that are more important to your business. Automation or the use of robotics are some of the ways you can try to reduce manual labor. For example, by switching to automation on a production line, you can reduce the number of workers needed to operate it.
Instead, you can reallocate these teams to handle more value-added tasks, such as quality control, product development, or process improvement. Perhaps when you automate one product line, you can have your team switch to designing your second product line.
Investing in robotics will also help you reduce your labor investment. Modern artificial intelligence technology can perform many intelligent tasks in a manufacturing plant. It doesn't require continuous manual input to make it run smoothly.
Increase productivity levels
High productivity has a direct impact on your contour profits. Therefore, investing in automation can help you increase productivity because manufacturing plants make financial sense.
When your factory has automation and robotics, you can program these machines to work at specific speeds.
But more importantly, because you're dealing with machine learning, you can increase that speed in ways that are nearly impossible to achieve with manual tasks that require human input.
From a productivity standpoint in manufacturing, accuracy is just as important as speed. This is where automation can help drive those improvements.
The high productivity of your machines will also help you deliver under pressure. If you're experiencing peaks in demand, it's easier to increase production with automation as opposed to manual operations.
Waste Reduction
Productivity is also linked to reducing waste. If you can minimize errors and discarded products, then you are one step closer to running an efficient and profitable business. Therefore, automation will also help you reduce waste in your business.
The first way to better manage waste is through more accurate manufacturing and reducing errors. With the right setup, you will have fewer waste products that do not meet quality standards.
You will also have the opportunity to track these metrics, which means you can run a waste reduction program for your business that is easy to set up, monitor, and manage.
You can also apply this to your inventory management. You can deploy automated systems to manage and optimize your inventory. This means less waste in your raw material inventory and less need for warehouse facilities.
Improving Safety
We've already talked about the idea of automation reducing the human input in the manufacturing process. There is also a side benefit to this change in your business and that is related to health and safety .
When you reduce the need for employees to be on the factory floor and around machines, you are helping to improve the safety of that environment.
In addition, you can even employ automation and robotics to help manage safety in your organization. One example of this is automated detectors for smoke, fire, or water.
Modern automation systems have a number of other safety features built in, such as automatic shutdowns during faults and safe distance monitoring (i.e., making sure people stay a safe distance away from hazardous areas).
The use of robotics also means that your employees can maintain a safe distance from machines through the use of tools such as robotic arms.
Reducing Energy Consumption
Using less energy will help your company to be more environmentally friendly and can also help you save money on your energy bills. But how can automation help you achieve this?
One answer is through productivity and increased efficiency. If you can get more done in the same amount of time, then you can use less energy in that time.
More advanced systems will also have specific features to help you reduce energy use, such as automated sensors that adjust settings when needed and optimize machine power consumption by incorporating big data monitoring. Well-designed modern automated machines, such as those designed and built by SP Automation, will be able to track and monitor consumption.
You can also invest in artificial intelligence, which will help you monitor energy usage in streamlined manufacturing processes, bringing you closer to identifying areas where energy consumption can be reduced.
Embrace Industry 4.0
Using less energy will help your company be more environmentally friendly, and it can also help you save money on your energy bills. But how can automation help you achieve this?
One answer is through productivity and increased efficiency. If you can get more work done in the same amount of time, then you can use less energy in that time.
More advanced systems will also have specific features to help you reduce energy use, such as automated sensors that adjust settings when needed and optimize machine power consumption by incorporating big data monitoring. Well-designed modern automated machines, such as those designed and built by, will be able to track and monitor consumption.
You can also invest in artificial intelligence, which will help you monitor energy use in streamlined manufacturing processes, bringing you closer to identifying areas where energy consumption can be reduced.