If you have not already done so, you should start to consider to automate manufacturing in your business. You already know that there are a lot of benefits that will come to your business if you automate manufacturing. You should do a lot of planning and considering the opinions and expertise that can be offered by experts from inside and outside your business before you automate manufacturing. Inside your business you have employees that are well versed in the details of how your production operations are currently done. Outside your business you should ask the advice and expertise of automation solution providers who know all the ways to implement automation in your business. When you start to think about how you might automate manufacturing for your company, the production line employees and the engineers in your company are a good starting source for ideas about where to start the ball rolling. Astute employees who work on the production lines can give you a very detail account of where tasks are the toughest. A conversation with them will quickly turn from where the job is hardest to their opinion of what to do to fix it with automation. Sometimes their opinions can be spot on as to how to ramp up production with automation. In other cases you will have to take their opinions with a grain of salt. It is up to you to decide what is the most effective automation ideas to consider for your business.
If your business has any memberships in professional associations or you have employees who are members of professional associations it may be a good idea to look into the resources that are available to the members. Sometimes these organizations have resources that are current with the edge of technology and can at the very least provide a starting point for evaluating automation solutions that may be very effective for your operations. Focus groups can from in these organizations particularly to investigate new technologies and how that they can benefit members of the organization. If you do not have these type of memberships available to you now, it might be a good idea to investigate joining ones that can be of help in this regard.
Engineers, especially, industrial or production engineers who relate directly to the production process, can give you very definite ideas about the areas of production that should be the highest level candidates for automation. These ideas will not only improve your production when implemented, but will also make the tasks that employees have to do much easier. Working with your engineering staff initially you can usually get a schematic of all the areas of production. This layout should indicate those areas that cause the impediment to production. These can be areas that require manual tasks to keep production running. They might be also be points in the line where inventory accumulates after a higher speed work cell before the product moves into a slower work cell. This layout will be a chart of efficiency for your production operation. It will allow you to see how all the work cells contribute to or deter effective production. Even though this layout is at a preliminary point in your considerations to automate manufacturing, it is a excellent way start the thought processes.
The layout can be upgraded to a value stream map of your manufacturing operation. The value stream map gives the characteristics of each work cell in the production process like the cycle time that is required at each work cell, how many operators are required to keep the work cell running, and what is the throughput of the work cell. This map is a natural next step after the creation of the engineering schematic described above. At the time of the creation of the VSM, you will probably be in the process of forming a team of technically qualified employees to guide the movement of your business to automate manufacturing. This team should include your most savvy employees who know the most about how you do your business. They will be able to contribute a great deal to your process of automation. This can also be a good way to give plaudits to the employees in your company who know the operation very well and help it to be prosperous. Conversely it might also help to indicate those folks who are not committed to the positive growth of the business. Unfortunately, not everyone is enthused about making changes and trying to learn more about how they can grow as the business grows and evolves. If employees are committed to helping make the changeover to automation they should be rewarded with more responsible positions in the company and better benefits.
Our consulting engineers can answer any questions that you might have about the automation of your business or they can supply you with a no-obligation quote for automation. If you have questions or you would like to request a quote for the automation of your business, please click the “Request a Quote” button below and fill out the form to submit your question or request.
