Speaker 0 00:00:02 Hello, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the robot industry podcast. This is the podcast dedicated to advanced manufacturing capital equipment and the robotics and automation industry. My name is Jim Beretta, and I am your host or guest today
Speaker 1 00:00:17 Is while Weaver from Earhart engineered solutions in granite city, Illinois. The air company is a robot systems integrator and custom machine builder. The company has been in business for over 80 years, and Earhart is our sponsor today while say sales application engineer with Earhart, and we're doing a series of podcasts on how to get started in automation, which is a great topic. And I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Whilst worked as a application engineer in several automation companies and has experience working in automotive and pharmaceutical food processing lab instrumentation and retail printing. So he's a wide variety of synergistic technologies, which undoubtedly has given him a wide variety of product and process knowledge. So welcome to a podcast, and we're happy to have you in our series on how to get started in automation for your factory. Thanks, Jim. I appreciate the opportunity today's podcast about lean automation and single station automation.
Speaker 1 00:01:16 And at Earhart, you are experts at assembly automation, robotics, and tooling, and of course lean. So while let's talk about Wayne, I have my first question is what do we mean when we say mean automation and how does it differ from say single station? Yeah. First one to just talk a little bit about what, you know, lean terminology was something that was coined in the late 1980s. Uh, the forefather of what we now refer to as lean is really the Toyota production system, which was, was born in Japan by Toyota automotive. Uh, certainly their success in implementing that is drawn a lot of attention worldwide and from a lot of manufacturers and different varying types of manufacturing. Do you know, there's been a lot written and a lot said about lean over the years. There's whole courses taught in school and certifications that could be achieved, uh, for lean principles and lean manufacturing in its simplest form.
Speaker 1 00:02:18 Lean refers to maximizing value and minimizing waste. Two of the core principles might be to boil it down a little bit. It would be make it make obvious what adds value by reducing or eliminating everything else, because if it's not adding value, it's considered to be waste. And secondly would be to improve workflow. You know, when we talk about automation, you know, these are the sort of things we look at as well as adding value to the product and eliminating waste. You know, when analyzing waste, most people, many times boil it down to time and materials. How can I save time? How do I save materials? And these things of course correlate into dollars and cents. Helene recoil also requires a flexibility to reconfigure and to have a continuous improvement mindset, take those principles. And those factors also lead well into an automation and providing you're producing something that is a lean automation concept over the years, we've seen where there's there's times that lean principles seem to be in conflict with automation.
Speaker 1 00:03:38 And I think in some cases it is still may be true today. And every, everyone really needs to look at their own processes and analyze those and figure out where their wastes are occurring and what are the best methods for solving them based on their own individual situations, their production volume requirements or quality requirements and things of that nature. But as we see, I think today, a lot of technologies have evolved tremendously. We have electric cylinders, which allow us to control and automate things a lot more simply and just a whole lot better than we, we did say 20 years ago, I think vision inspection, uh, is something that is certainly progressed from again, say 20 years ago where, you know, vision was, was very cost prohibitive in today's day, the hardware, and also the software and the application of it have developed into a more refined process and become more cost-effective.
Speaker 1 00:04:49 I think typically we think of lean automations as humans operating automated workstation, where we're automating some maybe assembly process with an electric screwdriver or something of that nature. Maybe even as a single station or a collection of stations. I think lean automation really is any automation that helps in the manufacturing process to achieve the production efficiencies by eliminating waste, whether this be a single human tended station, a collection of those stations, or even a robotic work cell can also in, in, if it meets your needs of eliminating your ways to producing more efficiencies for you, maybe considered a lean automation concept. Thanks.
Speaker 2 00:05:41 What are the customer motivations to picking a wean automation style to integrate in there
Speaker 1 00:05:46 Factory, typically customers are looking to, you know, improve efficiency, eliminate waste in their production operations. Uh, they have quality issues, maybe have manufacturing cost issues, or they may have ergonomic issues. These all can be drivers of a decision to pursue a lean automation system. Uh, many times the volumes of their production requirements may lead them towards, I want, you know, not some full blown assembly line with several robots and various automation stations such as admin. Maybe we just need to, to have more of a scaled down approach and automating some specific aspects of the production cycle. Maybe the most efficient means for solving the problems and the efficiencies and the waste issues that may be seen. The other things that may drive looking at Alain automation are recent volume increases or additions of a part model to the production mix, which then lead towards complications that drive us towards an automation solution. Thanks.
Speaker 2 00:07:08 Can you, I, can you give us some examples of what lean automation cell can look like and could it have a robot in it?
Speaker 1 00:07:14 Yeah, I think lean automation can take many forms. Uh, I think it's more about, again, reducing the waste and increasing your efficiency than necessarily what the form factor is. I think if we look at it that way, you know, it can take various forms. You know, it might be a single station with a manual assembly processes and say automatic leak testing. It could be a group of single stations, manually operated, arrange in an efficient pattern to maximize workflow such that maybe it's operated by a single operator, just moving from the part from station to station down the line, if your volumes are low enough such that that process works. I think robots can certainly be a big part of lean automation, especially, you know, as we kind of touched on earlier with the corporate incorporation division applications for inspection it's assaults, one of the things that, you know, inspection and pokey Oak we know, which is a key factor in eliminating scrap and waste.
Speaker 1 00:08:24 And in that form, you know, when we talk about pokey Oak, it's a term that means, you know, mistake proofing it, pokey Oak is in automation as, is any mechanism or technique that prevents mistakes from occurring. So a common example of this might be tooling that allows that forces a part to be presented in the proper orientation. Know, sometimes we have components of an assembly or sub assembly that could be, you know, different orientations. And if you get the wrong orientation, it may be 180 degrees or say 90 degrees out of sync of where it needs to be to create a final product that is acceptable. So in many cases, this, this can be done simply by designing the fixturing to nest tooling, such that the part can only be loaded one way by making sure that the features of the part are such that, uh, the tooling blocks it from being loaded incorrectly. And that's, you know, one of the more simpler ways, but it does require a mindset to think that way, because there may be many ways you can design that tooling that would allow the part to be loaded incorrectly.
Speaker 2 00:09:51 Thanks a while. And I think you're right. I think, uh, given the opportunity and operator will always load the part the wrong way. So you're right. Creating, creating as many tooling, uh, being very creative and being very smart and designing your tooling for one way. Operation makes sense.
Speaker 1 00:10:07 Yeah. That's a, that seems to be one common skill set that operators have is being able to, if you've left a means for something to go wrong, they will find out very quickly, uh, what that, what that thing is.
Speaker 2 00:10:24 Yeah. And you, hopefully you don't some doesn't crash because of it. Right, exactly. Um, so what are some of the best approaches to concept and building and delivering lean or single station automation?
Speaker 1 00:10:36 Well, I think there's a number of things to concentrate on to design and build a machine that is going to improve machine uptime and efficiencies. So some of the things we need to look at are quick change tooling. If you have multiple parts you're running or part models that are run through this lean lean automation, you need to make sure that to change out tooling. For instance, maybe the tooling itself is stored on the machine, say underneath the, the framework or on the side of the machine, uh, in the holsters as few tools as absolutely required, uh, ideally we would have no tools required for change out. It would might be a simple quarter turn of a component and we pop that out and we stick another one in and quarter turn and it's back ready to go. And we want to make sure this is a as also a case where we want to poke yoke to tooling.
Speaker 1 00:11:38 We want to make sure when we do a model change, if we select that new model that we have in fact installed the correct tooling. So this may require, uh, sensors on the machine to verify that we have the correct tooling installed for the model that we're going to run. And all of these things, we, you know, those sort of things we talk about with the pokios, whether it be a mechanical, you know, poke yoke is another key thing we want to look at when we're looking at the design of a, of a lean automation is, is poke yolks and mechanical or electrical or visual cues, which may be color matching. For example, if you think of when your, your kids had the toy with the tapes, the bucket that had the lid on it with the shapes of the star and the circle in the square and the triangle, and, you know, you had, if you didn't have the right shape, it didn't fit.
Speaker 1 00:12:39 You know, you had to have the right shape for the, you know, the right component for it to fit the shape in the lid. Uh, you know, and these things all affect that we don't have ms. Starts when we have a model change over and that we don't, you know, create bad parts because the part was loaded incorrectly, which then we create scrap and scrap is certainly waste. Another thing we look at, you know, in a lean concept is we want portability. We want casters or fork pockets, because we want this to be reconfigurable. Uh, you know, there may be stations within a lean cell where certain models don't require certain processes of the total build of that assembly. For instance, maybe a certain part model doesn't require the leak, the leak testing, for instance. And so in that case, maybe we move that station out and we move the other stations closer together so that we minimize that transfer time.
Speaker 1 00:13:51 Another thing we to consider because in all of these things go to being more efficient and minimizing downtime due to troubleshooting is when we look at the controls, we wouldn't have self diagnostics as much, much as possible say in our HMI, as we're as the machine and the automation is going through its processes, we would have messaging on the HMI screen to tell us where we're at in the sequence, such as something does go wrong. The operator knows where they were at in the process, what had just happened and what they expect to be happening is happening next. And so they can go directly to the source of the problem. We also look at doing that in our fault messaging, by indicating what exactly happened. Uh, this press motion did not achieve full stroke. So then we know we can go directly and at the things related to that, whether it, whether it be stroke sensors or, or other things in the, in that particular tasks that may be causing a problem clear, labeling is a key, uh, for devices for tooling.
Speaker 1 00:15:07 Again, this just reduces troubleshooting and we get in for preventative maintenance time when things are clearly labeled, there's no misunderstanding of what things are and what their purpose and function are in lean cells, lean automation. We want to make sure our maintenance accessibility is we pay attention to that. Things are easy to get to. We don't have to take three things apart to get to the item that needs to be maintained or replaced. If at all possible, we don't want this to be like our, our car out in the driveway, right. Where we have, you know, you open up the hood and you don't know where to start. I think another key aspect of that we consider in, in, uh, lean design is, is having a visual workspace charts, model diagrams, diagrams of what the part looks like what's going on in that particular station, for instance, you know, and also things like production requirements. So the operator is keenly aware of what's going on in that station and what the expectations are. One of the other key aspects of, of this is also ergonomics. Uh, obviously we want to keep operators safe because when they're safe and they're operating at the optimum human ergo standards, then they're going to be operating at the most efficient level that they can.
Speaker 2 00:16:46 Good points. Thank you very much for that. Well, um, I really have to agree with you on the good error messaging. There's some, there's a really gift there when you can tell your operator, you know, press the backup button or whatever they have to do.
Speaker 1 00:17:00 Exactly. I've learned over the years that that in and of itself saves a great number of phone calls. And those phone calls in the middle of the night of, you know, production is down and we can't figure out what's going on with this machine where, whereas simple messaging like that in many times lead you straight to the, to the source.
Speaker 2 00:17:24 Okay. And I liked your point too, on ergonomics, you know, is this, do you think ergonomics has just been the last couple of years that people are really taking a, a stance on ergonomics for the operators?
Speaker 1 00:17:36 Well, I think it's certainly something that is evolving and as safety and health organizations within companies become more prevalent. I think he have, you know, a greater focus on, on that being a return on investment item for production equipment, capital equipment automation, because there are lost time due to injuries, things of that nature. And then that requires training of new personnel or having, you know, all of those sorts of things that go with it. You don't, you know, that those are all just lost efficiency opportunities there.
Speaker 2 00:18:20 Yeah. It goes right to lien. Doesn't it like a case of carpal tunnel, right. To lean the right to waste. Hey, while many of the big automation companies really fall down when it comes to building simple automation, why do you think that is?
Speaker 1 00:18:36 So it's a difficult question. Um, you don't, you wouldn't necessarily think it would have to be that way. I think many times the smaller projects, okay. Companies are used to bigger, bigger projects. You get a certain bureaucracy in a certain way that you go about processing that in sometimes, you know, the smaller projects could take it for granted. And so, you know, they're may be not given their due. And I think also there's some of the things we mentioned in the, you know, the previous question, you know, those methodologies you go about in factoring in the human interaction. A lot of times on bigger automation lines, you know, there's less human interaction. So some of these things don't come into play as much. And then when you're scaling it down and it's all about a human interaction, your project structure, your mindset and objectives, aren't aligned as closely with, with some of the issues mentioned previously, you had to get, I think debris ocracy thing. I kind of liken it to, you know, the federal government is not necessarily the best means of handling some of our issues that occur at a more local level. You know, it's kind of a broader correlation, but I think it's sometimes that way, you're just, you know, a little bit too big and you're a little bit too far removed and you have trouble scaling back as an organization to address the lean or single station type automation opportunities.
Speaker 2 00:20:14 Thanks. So, um, I want to mention, or just talk a little bit about project management, because, you know, when you, you've got a project manager on a big project versus a project manager on single station, how's it different?
Speaker 1 00:20:26 I think, uh, you know, it kind of plays into, you know, the previous question we were talking about sometimes project management organizations, you have the structures for how you manage projects, and sometimes those can be overkill for these single single station projects where you don't require as much reporting. Uh, I don't require as much interaction. I may have one mechanical designer or one controls designer, as opposed to, I might have a team of mechanical designers and a team of controls designers and programmers on a larger automation. Whereas, you know, and maybe even in some cases, I may have a single engineer that's capable of doing the mechanical engineering required and also doing the controls piece of things. So I think we need to just make sure we conform our processes and not allow our processes to dictate, but allow us to be adaptable to the level of project as project size and the complication. And at the same time, we don't short change the design review process and the test and debug process to ensure that when we're putting a piece a, whether it be single station automation or a bigger automation line that is fully tested, and we don't, we're not going to have issues with startup and production.
Speaker 2 00:21:51 What about work assists or for white? We did kind of, we're talking about repetitive strain. Can these be built into a single state?
Speaker 1 00:21:59 Yeah, certainly there's, there are many single station automation. One very common example is screw or not driving with either electric screwdrivers or nomadic drivers. And a lot of times in the Lord lighter torque application, you may have like a overhead string balance or that allows the tool to hang in space and you can easily pull that down and into position and drive a single screw or go around a pattern in multiple screws when you get into higher torque operations, which might give you a kickback at the end of the torque, there are devices that are a torque arm. So it's a mechanical link arm that a driver would be mounted to. And this, that arm would absorb and resist the counteracting torque so that we wouldn't have injuries and, you know, or heart damage to parts much like when, uh, you know, if you're drilling with your drill at home on a home project in w gets stuck. And all of a sudden the drill is wanting to twist out of your hand and maybe injure your wrist, or if you let go of it, it flops around and breaks the drill bed or causes some other damage. So yeah, there are certainly those things that, that work themselves well into main stations.
Speaker 2 00:23:35 Thanks for awhile. So if I'm a manufacturer and there's lots of manufacturers out there that are not automated, can lean automation be a good way to get our feet wet in automating our,
Speaker 1 00:23:46 I certainly think it is definitely a good introduction. You know, there are many technologies that kind of, it mentioned earlier, uh, electric cylinders or servo press type cylinders are a good, good methodology of, of taking some pieces of your current assembly process, for instance, electric screwdrivers, vision inspection, and also some examples, uh, that may help certainly can help you achieve some better efficiencies. Well, just biting off a smaller piece of the, of the bigger pie starting with the smaller simpler approach gives, you know, allows for a couple of things. First, it gives you some confidence in those technologies that they truly are capable of solving your problems, the efficiency issues, or waste issues you may have also when it, when you start and you do those things, you're going to learn some things from it, maybe some things about at work, maybe some things could have been better.
Speaker 1 00:24:46 And so next time around when you try to, when you scale up, you'll have some lessons that you've learned from that, and you'll be able to, the next iteration of it will be, will be even better. You know, one of the, maybe the most important things is when you start small, like that, you give your chance self, a chance to be successful. And this is, I think, key for the rest of your production team and for your management. They're going to be much more likely to allow you to improve your capital equipment request next time around if you've had a great amount of success in your initial initial operation.
Speaker 2 00:25:26 So if you go lean say in a particular area of your plant, or you're just getting into automation, and then what happens if your volume increases, do you buy more lean? What happens?
Speaker 1 00:25:37 Well, I think that could be the, it could be the case, I think gives several options. Um, you may need to add more manpower. Maybe you're only operating one shift of your production now. So maybe you need to add additional shifts with the same, uh, lean automation that you have. It may be that you need to duplicate your processes. You need to go buy more of the same of what you have, because you're already operating at your maximum capacity as far as shifts or manpower availability go. Maybe the answer is that you need to further automate the processes to achieve more efficiency and increase your volumes that way, you know, and that may be, you may have reached a tipping point where more fully automating the process is the ROI may make sense for you now because you've achieved a higher level of volume, which may justify that further automation. And I know this
Speaker 2 00:26:44 Is a really hard question, but how long does it take to design and build a wean automation system? Because it's so dependent on the, on the, on the prep, on the thing you're doing. Right.
Speaker 1 00:26:53 Right. I mean, yeah. So there's, there's really no silver bullet answer. I don't think to this question, every project really, we, when we look at it needs to be considered for, you know, what, what exactly is going on? What are the technologies, what are the lead times are the components that are going to be factored into and used in the design and build of this particular station or automation system? I mean, I think typically when you're looking at a single station system, we may be somewhere in the 14 to 16 week timeframe, more complex systems that we typically get into. I think you're probably looking at somewhere in the 26 week lead time and potentially even a little bit longer, depending on, you know, the complexity, what all we're doing, you know, things of that nature. There's many factors that go into that, but that's kind of a rough,
Speaker 2 00:27:50 That's a good answer. No, I appreciate that. So what happens if you need many systems? Like if I need, uh, I'm designing, uh, some kind of something for an automotive and I need a 10 stations, how do you do that?
Speaker 1 00:28:02 Yeah. So in the case of, of multiple systems, uh, you know, if we're looking at 10 cysts, 10 stations that are identical stations, I think it's always going to be helpful to if at all possible plan the schedule. So you can debug and build the first one prior to building the remaining systems. That way we get that lessons learned in there, we rework on one station as opposed to getting two or three, two or three deep and realizing that, you know, I've got a problem and now I've got to rework it across multiple stations, you know, and if the schedule just doesn't allow you to do something like that, then you made need to look at prototyping, some of the higher risk pieces of it too, you know, and you know, all about minimizing your risks and the more you can, the more, you know, and the more you can debug and figure out proof of concept earlier on, you know, the better off you'll be.
Speaker 2 00:29:02 I guess it's a good example being lean and, and watching your waste. Right. Exactly. So what about, so we kind of been touching on health and safety and that, that you kind of mentioned the safety committee. Uh, what's your thoughts on that?
Speaker 1 00:29:18 Yeah, I think, you know, as we mentioned before, health and safety committees, I think are playing a vital role in today's production environment. Uh, many larger companies have a, have a whole department assigned to this, and that's what they do on a full-time basis. Some other smaller companies may have somebody maybe as part of, uh, the HR group that does this on a part-time basis at any rate. I think it's important as early as possible to know if there are any specific things about the product or about the process that to be aware of so that those can all be accounted for in the design process prior to getting into build. I've seen many times in my years, as a project manager where this group was not involved early on in the process. And then we got past the design review process and, and they get involved and they see things that the rest of us didn't see, or they make us make, make us aware of things that, you know, we weren't aware of, or maybe our counterparts weren't even aware of that are company policies that need to be adhered to whenever it comes to health and safety and certainly the worst in situations or when they don't get involved.
Speaker 1 00:30:42 You're, you're doing a runoff on your floor of the machine and the health and safety guys are coming and seeing it for the very first time. And a lot of times that's, that's not a good thing because you may run into issues that could have been headed off much earlier in the process, if they're, if they're, if they had been incorporated in an integrated into the design and review and approval process, uh, earlier in the game. Yeah. It's like that hockey stick, isn't it where it's so much expensive here to fix something after the fact after you've cut metal. Exactly. Well, listen, I wanted to thank you for, uh, taking time out of your day to chat with our audience. And while some of the listeners may have some other questions or need to understand more about lean and simple automation, how can people get in touch with you? My email is L Weaver. That's L w E a V as in Victor, E
[email protected]. Earhart solutions is E H R H a R D as in dog, T S O L U T I O N S again,
[email protected]. Feel free to reach me by phone as well at (937) 703-5246.
Speaker 0 00:32:19 I would like to thank and acknowledge our partner. <inaudible> the association for advancing automation. 83 is the umbrella association for the R I a a I a M C M a and a three Mexico. These four associations combined represent almost 1300 automation manufacturers, component suppliers, systems integrators, and users, research groups, and consulting firms throughout the world that are driving automation forward. I'd also like to thank and recognize our partner painted robot painted robot builds and integrates digital solutions. They're a web development firm that offers SEO and digital social marketing, and can set up and connect CRM and other ERP tools to unify marketing sales and operations as web and digital is changing. Painted robot is helping advanced manufacturers stay modern and competitive in the space. You can find painted
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[email protected]. Or you can find me Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. If you have an idea, an interesting company or a technology, or I'd like to be a guest or nominate someone to be guest, please send me an email. We'll see you next time. And thanks for listening. Be safe out there. Today's podcast was produced by customer traction, and I'd like to thank my nephew, Chris gray for the music, Chris Colvin for the audio production, my partner, Janet, and our sponsors <inaudible> and painted robot.
