Grow in the dark

摘要

As in the book "The Elves and the Shoemaker," the idea of arriving to work in the morning to find a day's worth of production already completed sounds too good to be true for many job shops. However, with advances in automation technology, the "fairy tale" of lights-out manufacturing has become a reality, or at least a possibility, for many shops that might not have previously considered it. By studying and understanding specific characteristics of manufacturing processes, automation can be applied to achieve lights-out production even for companies producing small volumes of many different parts. Most stable machining processes can be automated, as can part loading/unloading and other processes. Depending upon the processes being automated, the benefits of automation will vary among companies. It is worth evaluating the potential return on investment (ROI) of a project early on to better understand how to implement automation to achieve the best bang for the buck. Often, the scale of an automation project is proportional to the scale of the company and its production volumes. With an in-depth analysis of production processes and goals, an automated concept can be tailored for an application whether the company is large or small.