The goal for our blog is to educate businesses to make the right decisions, no matter who you purchase from, we want US companies to be strong and viable, after all we are all in this together. As Zig Ziglar says, you'll get what you want when you help enough other people get what they want, and that's what we're here to do!
At TBD Enterprises, we have seen so many companies choose the wrong automation for their plant and later regret their decision. Whether it’s the wrong product, the wrong manufacture, or the wrong process, it’s never too late to change the direction to make your company more profitable in the future.
The decisions you make are all dependent on whether you’re focusing on short term or long term goals. The biggest mistake we see companies make is making decisions because “we’ve always done it that way”, ladies and gentlemen, it is a new day and time to make decisions because “they are right for the future of our company and our employees”!
Over the next few weeks we will publish our thoughts on “Automation for Manufacturing” and would appreciate your comments, thoughts and debates.
With so many choices available for automation now, how do you choose the right one? How do you determine if you should go with flexible automation, dedicated automation or manual processes? There are so many things involved in the decision(s):
· Price (Not the same as cost)
· Cost (Not the same as price)
· Quality
· Cycle Time
· Change Over Time
· Flexibility
· Short term / long term goals
In our following blogs we will discuss the pro’s and con’s of the different types of processes and products and the effects each one has on the future of your business. But lets start with Price vs. Cost!
PRICE vs. COST
As we discussed above, we want to educate everyone so that you can make the right automation decision for your business, so we are going to use examples to explain our thoughts clearly.
It doesn't matter what process you are planning to automate you'll have decisions to make, it could be welding and you may have to choose between robotic or dedicated GMAW or maybe robotic or dedicated GTAW automation, it could be material handling and you may have to choose between grippers or vacuum, it could be trimming and you may have to choose between WaterJet, Laser and Router.
We'll pick a process to start with, let's look at trimming solutions and for the sake of argument we'll say that we have a choice between robotic Router and robotic WaterJet for trimming a composite part for the marine industry. Now most times one process will far out surpass the other in the area that means the most to you but for this example let’s say that both processes have been proven to give us acceptable cut quality, cycle time, change over time, flexibility and are equally environmentally clean processes.
You have picked a supplier that can offer you all of your automation needs and they have quoted a robotic Router cell for $200k and a robotic WaterJet cell for $300k, no brainer right? Wrong! The $100k difference is in the price not the cost and your work is really only half done.
If you don't take in to consideration the cost of consumables, power consumption, maintainability, required spare parts inventory, mean time to failure, mean time between failure and mean time to repair, you could make the wrong decision.
Many times when trimming composite parts, the router will require a diamond compression bit that may be in excess of $200.00 each and if we find that it fails at an average of every 300 linear feet of travel and we trim 600 linear feet per shift you may spend $400.00 per shift on that one cutter alone. Now multiply that by 2 shifts per day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks per year that means the difference in price may be made up in one cutter in less than 6 months.
Obviously this is an example and we didn’t take in to consideration the orifice and coil failures of the WaterJet but we hope you get the idea. We are just trying to tell you that you need to take all of these things in to consideration when making your decision.
Just imagine if this was a 5 year project, that one oversight could be a 1 million dollar oops. We can tell you that we have seen companies that have a lot of those 1 million dollar oops going on and many times is the difference between a successful company and a bankrupt company. You need to do the due diligence up front, for you, your company and your employees, you'll be happy you did.
At TBD Enterprises, we give you all the tools needed to make the right decision, we can assist with simulations to determine cycle time, test samples to determine process quality and capability, and we can help you to calculate the “costs” involved to create an accurate ROI so that you make an educated decision when trying to choose the right automation process for you and your business.
If you have questions, please feel free to send us an email or call us, we'd be happy to help you with your project.
Bernie Ritchey
bernie@tbdenterprisesllc.com
(248) 496-2368
Tom Washburn
tom@tbdenterprisesllc.com
(248) 535-6737
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