Our company has been automating and integrating production processes for years. Answering invitations by manufacturing enterprises, we visit factories, in which components and products are manufactured. Some of them have multi million volumes, other are produced in small series. We assist in implementing solutions, which purpose is to improve quality of production, reduce number of standstills, errors and waste. For many run maintenance engineers the priority is the speed of manufacturing, other focus on excellent quality of precise devices and components.
Research and development – basis of modern automation
Analyzing our production automation implementations one can quickly reach a conclusion that currently emphasis has to be put on research and development of automation. Such requirements are imposed by reality, which slowly moves away from manufactures, in which in huge halls, on dozens of stations, stand hundreds of people soldering wires and assembling components by hand. Every factory is different, with different technical background, manufactures various elements, but every one of them faces the same future. Sooner or later they will have to automate even a part of their production. Such challenges appear also before systems integrators. How to find optimization of manufacturing, cost saving and investment return as beneficial as possible? In the current stage of development of technology we cannot delude ourselves – some tasks have to be performed by a human. Anyway, when talking with mangers of factories, we haven’t heard even once that personnel reduction is the reason for robotization. Currently the needs of industry are so big that employees perform jobs that can be robotized are required for other tasks.
Automation is an investment!
Manufacturing is also described with one more characteristic, which is in fact it’s foundation. Creating certain goods, we are doing it because we want to sell and profit on them. Here however appear the aspect of competition, rivalry. Automation of production processes and it’s equipment it’s not only cost. It’s first and foremost an investment. This single magic word, behind which stand numerous zeroes on company’s bills, is however a ticket to highway of development and increase of capabilities and resources of the factory. On such highway there are companies, which have begun investing long time ago. However the fuel of development sometimes runs out and processes of manufacturing require a lifting. It happens for many reasons – mainly because progress requires miniaturization, change in design or new functionality.
Like cars that some time ago could fare our roads with speed of 120 and now 140 km/h.
How Alnea approaches automation processes?
Team of Alnea acknowledges necessity of constant investment, so we offer not only implementations of automation, but also improvement of functioning of already existing infrastructure, integration of machines, devices and systems. Revolution 3.0, which in many factories is a fact, in other only crawls on all fours. Varied development of different branches of industry is the reason that for many automation engineers vision of industry 4.0 – digitalization and management of manufacturing from a cloud is only a dream and for some an obvious requirement for meeting demands of current market. That’s why commit to projects related to technologies of the future. Sometimes our contractors even before signing a contract for automation and robotization of a line already reserve ability of access to the Big Data. That is the moment of contact of visionaries and hard realists.
The foundation is constant development
Exchange of experiences on trade shows, exhibitions and systems integrators meets is for us a source of inspiration, which repeatedly present in current trends in automation. Work of our engineers has twofold implications. While thinking about issues related to manufacturing and automation, we solve more general problems. The example is our patented soldering packet Zeus, which contains:
– controller, which will cope with most difficult challenges (i. e. soldering really small elements made of elastic PCB),
– soldering tin feeder – an answer to expensive counterparts of different manufacturers
– ergonomically shaped soldering head.
However portion of the problems in the field of automation and production systems integration are very individual cases for each factory or concern narrow spectrum of application of automation. Through teamwork we have, more than once found unique solutions.
Touching many issues in this entry, I would like to encourage you to visit our web page in search for inspirations, knowledge and maybe criticism that will motivate us to progress and rethinking anew certain questions.
