| Automation | Adept Cobra ™ i600 4-axis SCARA Robot |
| AdeptSight vision system |
| Benefits | Doubled production rate from 750 to 1500 pieces per shift |
| Relief of workers to perform more important tasks | |
| Reduction in inaccuracies of manual efforts | |
| Reduction in pieces to be reworked due to inaccuracies | |
| Reduction in workers required for manufacturing on each shift | |
| Improvement in production consistency | |
| Improvement in safety for production done | |
| Improved employee job performance | |
| Improved consistent delivery of products to customers |
Problem: A watch manufacturer sells watches through a wide network of retail establishments. There are several lines of unique watches offered through the sales outlets. The company is constantly designing new watch configurations in its manufacturing facility. In the manufacturing process each of the watches has to be manually handled in order to create connections and perform the required machining. 
Since the loading and unloading is done manually this creates a bottle-neck in the production process. The entire production process depends on the effectiveness of this manual operation. An employee can only continually load and unload these pieces for production for a period of about 3 hours. At the end of this period another employee must take over or the production operation will completely shutdown. The manual handling of parts for loading and unloading requires concentration. When the production is running, any mishandling of parts can cause incorrectly machined parts. This causes rework and down time in production. The company evaluated replacing the manual tasks with automation. It was felt that automation would be able to continue the production process indefinitely with a great deal of accuracy. This would also free the employees that were doing the manual tasks for other more important tasks. There were concerns by management about the cost of automation being prohibitive, felling that the return on investment would be very long.
Analysis of the manual process determined that the Adept Cobra™ i600, a 4-axis robot, along with vision capability would best fill the automation needs. The characteristic of this robotic being able to perform the horizontal loading made it an ideal candidate for the job. The model that was selected had the exact abilities without being more heavily equipped than it needed to be. Electronics were internal, so that the SCARA robot was totally self contained. Added to the SCARA robot was the vision and guidance system of AdeptSight. Employees became very familiar with the use of the guidance system since the software that controls it runs on a PC and the user interface is easy to understand.
Solution: Company engineers designed the appropriate gripper for the SCARA robot. The company also applied the abilities of conveyor and other parts that were available to make the automation as efficient as possible. Robot positioning in the production area was done so that the robot was able to attend the loading and unloading for three separate work cells. Only one employee was needed to act as operator for the robot on each of two shifts. Previously there were three employees on each shift to maintain the manual operation. The employee is removed from a pressure situation of doing manual tasks to keep production running. Now the employee brings a tray of components to the production line. The robot puts a part on the production conveyer and the vision system orients the part before entering the machining process. Once positioned the robot picks the part and moves to the first machine to start the machining process. After the first machine is finished the robot moves the part to two successive devices for machining.
All this loading and unloading would drive a sane man crazy if he had to do it for more than two minutes. The robot is accurate, reliable, and never complains about all the work it has to do. Speed is a factor, all the loading and unloading takes place in about 15 seconds. It is doubtful that a man could perform these processes this fast and with accuracy, even if he wanted to!
Overall reduction of man hours involved in production was the labor hours of 4 employees. Near elimination of product rework, down time due to manual misplacement of products, the frustration and fatigue of employees trying to keep up with a production process. The most important improvement in production was the doubling of production output from 750 pieces per 8 hour shift to 1500 pieces per shift.
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