Productivity knows that when it comes to manufacturing, change can seem overwhelming, time-consuming and scary — to say the least. While not all change is created equal, many shops resist changing to automation for a number of reasons. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way, and automation integration shouldn’t keep you up at night nor should workers fear being replaced. In fact, you’ll be surprised by the number of productive hours you’ll gain and new projects and business you’ll be able to take on with automation. The best place to start is with Productivity’s applications and automation experts who are committed to helping companies implement innovative automation solutions that meet manufacturing challenges. They’ll guide you through the process of your robotics integration projects from start to finish. Whether you’re adding one or many robots, automating your turning production processes with bar feeders, automatic pallet loaders (APLs), or using vending systems to automate control of tooling and accessories, this guide will demonstrate the multitude of benefits of automation and help you make the best decision for your manufacturing facility.
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With the push for Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing and the importance of reaching higher productivity and efficiency levels, automation in manufacturing is paramount. Over the decades, automation has become a standardized production tool empowering manufacturers to gain better control of their operations and production processes. With automation’s ability to streamline repetitive, hazardous, and tedious tasks, an automated system can perform load/unload tasks, processing, inspection, assembling or handling of parts unattended or lights out, allowing one employee to work on several machines or other jobs at the same time.
Automation in manufacturing can help lower costs, improve worker safety, reduce factory lead times, provide faster ROI, allow your operation to become more competitive, increase production output, and so much more!
Explore the benefits of automation in detail with this guide. You can also check out Productivity’s Robotics & Automation Services.
Robots can perform the work of three to five people, depending on the task. And bar feeders and APLs allow your machinists to attend to multiple machines at once. In addition to savings on the cost of labor, energy savings can also be significant due to lower heating requirements in automated operations. Automation integration streamlines processes and increases part accuracy, which means minimal material waste for your operation.
Automated cells, bar feeders and APLs remove workers from dangerous tasks. Your employees will thank you for safeguarding them against the hazards of a factory environment.
Automation can keep your process in-house, improve process control and significantly reduce lead times compared to outsourcing or going overseas.
Automation solutions are based on your unique needs and goals and pay for themselves quickly due to lower operating costs, reduced lead times, increased output and more.
Automated cells, bar feeders and APLs allow you to decrease cycle times and cost-per-piece while improving quality. This allows you to better compete on a global scale. Additionally, the flexibility of automation integration enables you to retool a cell to exceed the capabilities of your competition.
A robot has the ability to work at a constant speed, unattended, 24/7, as do bar feeders and APLs. Automation in manufacturing means you’ve got the potential to produce more. New products can be quickly introduced into the production process and new product programming can be done offline with no disruption to existing processes.
Automated cells, bar feeders and APLs typically perform the manufacturing process with better consistency than human machinists. This results in greater control and consistency of product quality.
By streamlining equipment and processes, reducing scrap and using less space, automation uses less energy. A key benefit of automation is that it reduces your environmental footprint which can save you real money.
Consistent production by automation integration allows a shop to reliably predict timing and costs. That predictability permits a tighter margin on almost any project.
Automated cells have large amounts of potential capacity concentrated in one compact system. This allows shops to produce parts in-house that have previously been outsourced.
Robots are designed on compact bases to fit in confined spaces. In addition to being mounted on the floor, robots can be mounted on walls, ceilings, rail tracks and shelves. They can perform tasks in confined spaces, saving you valuable floor space.
Productivity will work with you to provide a complete robotics solution system — hardware, software and controls. Your cell will be proven out at Productivity and shipped out production-ready — allowing you to start making parts as soon as it’s installed in your shop.
Over the next three decades, statistics show that more than 76 million baby boomers will retire and only 46 million new workers will be available to replace them. During this time, your demand for labor will continue, making automation a real and viable solution.
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Digital Transformation
Take a look at 10 benefits of process automation that can help businesses improve their competitiveness today in this blog from Impact.
Process automation comes with many benefits for businesses who choose to implement it into their organization’s day-to-day operations.
Many of these advantages positively affect costs, time, and production, but many also go deeper and impact every part of a business from the ground up.
Learn more about some of the top benefits of using automation in your business’ daily processes.
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Automation, particularly when you can use software robots to emulate repetitive human actions like robotic process automation (RPA) software does, can make a big impact on the overall efficiency of your organization in different ways. Some of the effects include:
Faster Processing—Compared to humans, RPA can complete several times as many processes so you can handle more transactions more quickly.
24/7 Operating—RPA software robots don’t need to sleep and don’t get tired. They process around the clock, keeping certain business tasks and operations running at all hours. If something needs human attention, they also have the ability to set tasks aside until morning.
Analytics Collection—RPA collects data on everything it does, filing it into reports that you can analyze and to identify issues in your processes you might not have noticed. This will help check for common process ailments like bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and slow areas.
Improved Accuracy—Using RPA software helps to remove the vast majority of human error from processes as it’s designed to follow specific rules.
One of the most obvious benefits of process automation is the boost in productivity that comes with handing off repetitive tasks to robots who can work longer and faster than a human.
Additionally, automation solves some of the wasted time presented by the “productivity paradox,” where more technology slows processes down as people spend time navigating, switching between, and training on new apps. This poorly integrated technology is solved by RPA.
The amount of boosted production depends on what type of RPA robots are being deployed. There are two different types that have different working relationships with their human counterparts:
Attended Bots—These bots work in collaboration with humans in order to complete transactions. A human might focus on customer-centric tasks while the bot handles data, calculations, reporting, and notifications. Because of the human element of attended RPA, the process is slower.
Unattended Bots—In this case, processes are automated and executed without human assistance required. The bots are free to operate 24/7 which means production is ramped up.
Which type of bot you choose depends on the tasks you’re automating and the nature of your business. Some processes simply require human interaction to make decisions, but some don’t.
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Overall, automation helps solve many problems within a process that streamlines it, meaning more production and less wasted time.
Automation saves money in different ways within your business.
First, it takes away repetitive, “boring” tasks from workers so they can focus their time on more important tasks and ones which require creative and critical thinking.
This saves money by removing a lot of wasted time for your employees who can now tackle harder issues within your organization.
It’ll help you reduce the parts of your paid wages that go toward these types of tasks and, in some cases, completely replace them. This means you can also re-invest those wages into different jobs that will make a larger impact on business.
If a business is in one of the many fields which require maintaining certain regulatory standards (finance, healthcare, etc.), then RPA can actually help you get and stay compliant with those regulations.
Deploying RPA can help businesses build out their compliance programs by providing another level of oversight and control over processes.
RPA bots perform every process exactly the same every time—this reduces the chances of errors. The bots also report their own actions into an activity log which means you get a 100% accurate audit trail.
This is a crucial element of most security regulations, which require organizations to have a clear understanding of the state of their data and ensure that it is always handled safely.
Errors can be expensive—they cost businesses over $62.4 million every year—but using RPA robots greatly reduces the risk of human error in your processes because a bot performs tasks the same way every time as programmed. Additionally, since data is automatically ported, there is no chance of typos or other attention span-based mistakes.
Fewer errors also relieve some of the burden on your workforce by allowing your staff to spend less time dealing with the fallout. This saves the business money by not having to dedicate time to reworking, not to mention avoiding costly fines or even network downtime.
RPA also reduces errors on a larger scale through data gathering and report building that can give a company a better idea of their processes’ weak points and how to improve efficiency across departments.
One of the most exciting robotic process automation benefits is the positive effect it can have on your customers, their experience with your business, and the way that you serve them.
With RPA, you can respond to customer queries faster and more efficiently, respecting your customer’s time and handling their questions and requests successfully at the exact moment they need answers.
What used to take hours or even days now only takes minutes. This, of course, can be applied to any number of customer interactions, including order processing.
Process automation like this will improve your company’s reputation among your audience through positive word-of-mouth, stronger online reviews, and increasing repeat customers.
Nothing tires an employee more than boring work. Luckily, RPA specializes at removing that kind of repetitive, time-consuming work and allowing those workers to focus on things that challenge them to think creatively and critically.
This increases efficiency, raises morale, and even boosts productivity in a workforce when it is successfully implemented.
One challenge many businesses face when looking to implement RPA is getting buy-in from the same people whose lives will be easier once the bots are deployed as they get nervous that the automation will replace their jobs entirely.
However, when it is clearly communicated that implementing RPA won’t leave them searching for work, they know what the changes to their day-to-day tasks will look like, and understand that the advantages of automation include making their job easier and more exciting, they often end up being the software’s biggest advocate at the company.
Using RPA is a very environmentally-friendly option because it lets you take processes that usually eat up paper and other resources and digitize them so they don’t require consumables at all.
Beyond digitization, a digital document workflow incorporates automation into processes involving files. It routes each document to any human that needs to see and sign off on it, and then stores it in an easily-findable and searchable shared folder.
By establishing these digital document workflows, you can effectively eliminate all paper use within your organization, making you greener and saving you money and time.
As we’ve discussed, one of the advantages of automating processes is that the way information is handled is standardized, so there’s no need to go back and clean up any data your company may have.
A key element of growing your organization is having measurable goals, and then tracking defined key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine whether or not your plan to meet them is working. However, when information is handled entirely by humans, it can be riddled with errors, making it impossible to trust your KPIs or measure the effectiveness of your strategy.
With this reliable, standardized data, it’s much easier to analyze what you have for patterns, see how your long-term plans are working, diagnose pain points, make informed decisions for the future, and implement a business intelligence strategy to grow even more.
An automated, robotic workforce has the ability to be whatever size you need it to be depending on your business.
If you grow, it’s easy to grow your RPA alongside you for minimal extra cost. This is a massive benefit of automation that allows your business to be as agile as possible by quickly and efficiently scaling up or down depending on the time of year or because of consistent growth.
It also means that you’ll never outgrow your automation solution, nor will you ever be forced to pay for software that is much higher capacity than what your business needs at the time. RPA meets exactly what your needs are exactly when you need it.
The importance of automation becomes clear as businesses evolve and customers demand faster processing of goods and services. Therefore, process automation can not only improve your business, but also protect its continuity.
The budget decreases driven by process automation can be used to scale a company, hire needed talent, or invest in innovation initiatives.
For example, healthcare organizations have high administrative costs, but with process automation, which uses data-based software to monitor the billing process, the time and budget spent on these tasks will decrease.
Because of the rise of telehealth, the use of patient portals and healthcare apps, automation technology can make billing and payment a painless process. This industry example gives insight into the importance of automation.
As more industries begin to invest in process automation, business leaders should consider an automation strategy that will not only help them to transform their business, but also allow them to remain competitive.
There are plenty of benefits that come with the implementation of RPA in your business, from freeing up your human workforce to streamlining processes. Together they make automation a big win for any organization.
The benefits of RPA are not only external but can also positively affect a company’s workforce and improve company culture.
Process automation can reduce processing time and costs, improve employee morale, and help a company’s sustainability and continuity.
RPA is changing the way small businesses operate in today’s constantly evolving landscape. To learn more about how you can modernize your organization, check out our eBook, Fast-Tracking Your Digital Transformation.
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