When you watch an NFL game, you are in front of the TV for 3 hours and 12 minutes. On average, you see more than 100 commercials during the game. On average, the amount of time they run plays on the field is 11 minutes. So you have 11 minutes of action out of 192 minutes (that’s 5.7 percent; let’s be kind and round up to 6 percent). When broadcasts were extended a few years ago from three hours to three hours and a quarter, it wasn’t to fit more game in.
In a way, we’re doing the opposite with manufacturing automation. We keep working on that 6 percent of “play running time” that a piece of metal experiences in the shop. This is done by increasing the speed of machines and the things that get automated inside the machine. We will never reach a time when we think speeds and feeds are not important.
However, if you consider the last 10 years or so, much effort has been directed at the rest of the time, the “non-play-running time.” One example is making interactive, intuitive changes at the controller rather than scrapping a project and rerunning it after the programmers have another whack at it. Or, think about the hundreds of products available to automate the loading and unloading process.
Here are the areas of focus for the manufacturers of products and systems that you’ll use every day, grouped not according to a machine-centric view but from your shop’s point of view:
- Let humans do what they’re good at. Is it worth the risk, loss of time, and to coin a phrase, bottleneck-friendly practices to put humans into a situation where they spend the day unloading 40-lb. parts and place them on a pallet? Although the task is important, there is no overall judgment of it that requires a human to do it. Robots and cobots excel in this application. Trace it backward and you’ll find yourself at the machine, perhaps one that uses a suction-cup part offloader. Let the humans figure out the best way to choreograph all these steps in the process, we’re good at that and we generally don’t hurt ourselves doing it.
- Keep nibbling away at the time spent moving materials. Subindustries are being born as we speak, and one of the most recent ones is autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). There were a lot of ways to automate the materials we use and the scrap we sell but one of the opportunities for “time reclamation” is in material motion. We mostly use mules—the propane-driven kind—to move this metal around the shop from receiving to a laser. And if a system can help us shuffle the sheets correctly, we gain even more time because the machine’s jobs are planned out ahead of time.
- Meet your new best friend: concurrency. This might just be the next main focus area for efficiency. If you look at all the areas we can automate like programming, transport (with AGVs or AMRs), machine tending, palletizing, and all things in between, you must note that we are fighting the time and motion battle on many fronts. When you step back and see these things in action not just alone but as a part of a whole, you begin to see more ways to improve. This is where concurrency comes into play. It can work wonders. You are probably reaping some rewards of concurrency already. The place to look for opportunities is in somewhat related tasks, but not so related as to be a dependency situation. In a combination product like a laser/punch, this happens in different ways, such as the laser scrap being automatically removed while the punch gets back to work or new tools set for the next job. Pull that apart into different areas of your shop, and you will start to see all the things that can happen concurrently, and maybe get a better look at the dependencies that cannot be concurrent.
Manufacturers are putting these thoughts into their overarching software systems that help manage a fabricating company. As we move forward, we’ll see some of the features mimic big-time ERP systems in function if not in scope.
And go ahead an make a game of it, see if you can spot new dependencies or new opportunities for concurrency. You might take a process from 3+ hours down to 11 minutes.