Robot time and cost management in the application to multiple low-volume production processes

Abstract

Typically, a manufacturing company will only consider the implementation of a robot to a production process if the annual product volume is high enough to ensure a high utilization of the robot and therefore an acceptable return on the investment. In particular, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often lack the production volumes, for each individual product or product family that they manufacture, that would justify the procurement of a robot using this traditional criterion. In this work we address the situation where a company, typically a SME, manufactures manually a number of substantially different products in batch and/or flow mode, where none of the individual annual volumes are high enough to justify the implementation of a dedicated robot to any part of the production, and we study the feasibility of employing a robot to several substantially different production processes within the company over a specified production period (e.g. one year). We show that this approach, through maximizing the exploitation of robot flexibility, can result in substantial cost savings by SMEs, while meeting production time targets and potentially improving product quality.