- January 24, 2020
- Posted by: Konica Minolta
- Category:
Businesses of nearly any size and in nearly every industry are looking to automation to help improve competitiveness and employee safety. Manufacturing processes were early targets for automation, and advances in cost-effective, safe, and easy-to-deploy collaborative robots quickly made this type of automation accessible. A prime target is material transportation. In manufacturing, even highly automated plants, however, still use skilled workers to manually push carts or transport pallets with forklifts, or use rigid, inflexible systems like line-guided AGV’s or conveyors. Today, these traditional logistics systems are being challenged by the more sophisticated, flexible, and cost-effective technology of autonomous mobile robots (AMR).
So Is it necessary to automate your business with AMR?
5 Reasons: Why you should automate your business with AMR
1. Enhancing Efficiency & Flexibility
Industry 4.0 enable optimization, individualization and flexibility for production concepts, and the need for exactly those promises are today larger than ever for companies in all types of industries. Manufacturers are increasingly moving to mass customization models, where they must be able to quickly switch between a higher number of smaller batch sizes, which requires high flexibility and agility in production.
AMR is designed to supports the variety of module options in performing different workloads, such as hooks for trolleys , Latching mechanism for supporting larger dimension and Lifts for heavier items. As the result of increasing overall efficiency in manufacturing and allows you to customize operations as needed
2. Shortening the lead time
The robot is able to calculate the appropriate and fastest route by using scanners, a 3D camera and ultrasonic sensors. When integrated with AI, it will be able to calculate the nearest pickup and delivering route. If it encounters any obstacles, it will re-route or call for help.
In this way, AMR ensures that materials are delivered on time, both to and from the production, and thereby reduce bottlenecks and waiting time.
3.Allocating Human Resources Wisely
Globally, companies are facing labor shortages while focus on reducing costs to stay competitive continue. Therefore, companies need to use the human resources the best way possible and use robots for what they are best suited for
AMR takes over the monotonous and non-value-adding task of transporting your goods, for example, within the production or between warehouse and production, and thereby enabling employees to focus on their actual work.
4.Offering the Fast ROI
The easy integration and the fact that companies do not need to make changes in the existing factory layout when integrating AMR allows low initial costs. Moreover, AMR is a reliable workforce that can run for around 12 to 15 hours without brakes. It can charge automatically, when they do not have tasks to perform, ensuring a smooth workflow and optimizes the internal logistics.
The ROI is typically less than a year, due to this easy integration and because the robots free up employees to perform higher value tasks.
5. Improving Working Environment
AMR is collaborative and can work side by side with people without safety measures . They will always avoid obstacles – including people – and stop if you get too close. AMR is therefore a safe alternative to indoor driving with forklifts, stackers and trucks, which traditionally cause many collisions and other work injuries.
Employees can also save steps and exhaustive lifting, and stress can be reduced when robots take over the logistics tasks. That the robots are collaborative and created to work with people does not only relate to safety, but also the ease of use of the robots. With an easy and intuitive interface, the AMR can be programmed and operated without previous experience, which empowers the employees, and everyone can now learn how to program robot.
AMR is a new challenge of digitizing your business, considered as a worthwhile investment comparing to the given benefits from various capabilities of the automation system. Therefore, it will help your business maintain a long-term competitive advantage without worrying and waiting for being disrupted by the new technologies because today you have equipped the best technology.
Credit: mobile-industrial-robots.com