While the company has embraced the many advantages the automated cell provides—increased throughput, the ability to take on more work and faster timing—they acknowledge that the changes have led to some challenges.
There is so much on the process side you have to work through,It does change your system. Our applications programmer gathered input from our tooling leaders on best moldmaking practices and developed some custom software to allow us to analyze the components of our business and track things more effectively.
All in all, this has been a great team effort, and everyone had input into what would create the biggest bang for the buck and help improve their throughput personally as well as for the company. We never lost sight of the fact that our focus can’t be on just building a tool, but is all about getting the customer into production as effectively as possible.
We’ve had excellent support from Mitsubishi EDM and great people internally to work through issues,We’ve been able to work through tremendous change with no negative impact on our customers. Your people need to be up for the challenges that come with such a change and be willing to accept change.
We’ve seen the quality of the tools go up, which is hard to quantify other than to say that customer satisfaction has been excellent. And—as an end result of that customer satisfaction—we’ve experienced increased quote volumes and overall higher sales volumes.
Overall, We started this process more than a year ago and began a very aggressive implementation timeline of three months, but the reality of it is takes about six to nine months before you begin to get proficient,Over the past couple of months we are beginning to see tremendous advantages.
You can get the cell up and operating in weeks, but to really understand all of the nuances and get it incorporated into your processes takes much longer.
We know that automation is the path we’ve chosen,As our sales and productivity increase, we will continue to drive automation—however that looks—whether it is new equipment or new processes.
It’s a path that we will continue to go down. There are no short-term plans to purchase additional robots until we’ve analyzed how productive we really can be, but as we continue to grow, we’ll do whatever it takes to be an automated shop competitive in today’s environment. It’s really been a nice win for us.
Automation is often referred to as a way to increase productivity and get more done. But what do the facts say about this statement?
Essentially, productivity is the rate at which a company, team, or individual can conduct their work and produce results. By extension, it defines how much a person can achieve within a set period of time. Some examples we’ve all encountered are:
How many items can you cross off your to-do list on a regular work day?
What side-project are you working on in your free time?
How many times do you work out per week?
This search for optimization and efficiency applies to most areas of our lives. However, as research on the topic piles up, it can be challenging to pin down the actual reasons behind productivity (or lack thereof).
Lately, the question of productivity at the workplace has shifted to a number of factors, including:
Company culture / Employee wellbeing / Effectiveness of business processes / Leadership and team support / Available tools and resources
And automation, which has the power to influence all of the above.
What is automation?
The term automation describes technologies that help reduce human intervention in processes. It comes in many forms, including:
Robotics / Computerization / Artificial Intelligence /Mechanization
Automation has always been propelled by the desire to get more done, reduce costs, and limit the possibility of human error, all at once.
Over the past few decades, automation has become an unavoidable feature of how we live and work, bringing unprecedented value to both, and also raising important questions about our future as well.
Take the digital process automation market, which is expected to reach a value of $16.12B by 2026.
These digital solutions are leveraging automation technology to help companies streamline business processes, across industries and job roles:
Human resources: Using automation to screen resumes or job applications
Marketing: Targeting advertising campaigns with smart algorithms
Customer service: Answering customer questions using chatbots and virtual agents
Sales: Forecasting, automating data entry and analyzing calls
It is likely that you’re already familiar with some of these. According to a McKinsey study, 31% of businesses have already fully automated at least one function. But while automation might seem like a perfect solution, what is the actual impact on company productivity?
Random online resources can be biased, not giving a full picture of the intricate relationship between automation and productivity. To cut through the noise, we sorted through academic research and trustworthy sources to highlight concrete, data-backed findings on the topic.