Skilled workers are increasingly difficult to find in Germany and other parts of Europe. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular are faced with the difficulty of handling orders with insufficient employees. This means that if a company’s order volume increases, its capacity can be quickly exceeded. Robots increase productivity and at the same time relieve employees in the work process.
Any skills shortage challenges employers: on the one hand, firms must ensure high employee satisfaction in order to retain permanent staff. On the other hand, companies often cannot continue to grow if they lack the employees they would need to do so. As the three examples below show, this is where automation comes in to offer great opportunities for SMEs. Robots developed by automation company KUKA, for example, take on monotonous, physically demanding tasks, meaning the team can devote itself to other assignments. In this way, employers increase productivity, as well as employee satisfaction by giving them more freedom for more complex activities.
1. Humans and robots check codes together
At FMO Surface in Lemgo, Germany, around seven million plastic bus connectors are lasered with DataMatrix codes (DMC) every year. In times of a shortage of skilled workers, that’s a lot. For Managing Director Bastian Fest, the solution was therefore obvious: automation. What was previously scanned exclusively by employees is now processed jointly by a human and a collaborative robot. Equipped with two cameras, the robot checks the DataMatrix codes. For this purpose, 200 plastic parts slide under the robot on a tray. “The first step spot-checks the quality of the codes on the basis of 20 parts,” explains foreman Tim Hertz. “If everything is OK, the cobot moves over the tray again to check whether all 200 parts are present and all codes are readable.” If something is wrong, such as if a code is of poor quality or incomplete, the robot stops and points out the affected bus connector. A human colleague can then replace the faulty part, the robot checks the tray again and ideally releases it. Importantly, this human-robot collaboration ensures maximum safety and efficiency. The robot “saves us an enormous amount of time because we no longer have to scan each part individually,” Hertz summarizes.
2. Industrial assembly: robot screws in flow operation
Qbig engineers specialize in increasing the productivity of industrial plants. The developers from Lodz, Germany, recently boosted the productivity of a major household appliance manufacturer by integrating a six-axis robot into an assembly line, where it now screws porthole windows into washing machine doors. The robot screws in continuous flow operation, meaning it assembles the components while they are moving along the conveyor system. “By using robots, we were able to shorten cycle times and thus increase productivity,” reports Bartosz Luczak, co-owner of Qbig.
3. Robots work day and night
Austrian screw jack manufacturer ZIMM had expensive machines in is production halls, but not enough people to work its 3-shift operation. The solution for the company were robots to load a five-axis milling machine, perform automated finishing of the workpieces, and offload the completed screw jack components. The process shows how robot and milling machine are perfectly matched to each other. While the milling machine is still working, the robot is already loading another fixture. Once the components – which are also turned automatically – have been finished on both sides, the robot places them on the finishing station in the cell. There, another robot deburrs and cleans them. “Among other things, the automation allows us to produce in unmanned shifts at night and on the weekends, which increases our productivity and competitiveness,” explains Hardy Ponudic, Head of Production at ZIMM.
Productivity, quality and employee satisfaction increase
As the three company examples above highlight, robots can greatly increase productivity. In addition to the increase in the number of components a company can produce, robots are highly durabable. Firstly, this pays off financially; and, secondly, it makes the investment sustainable. Experience also shows that robots do not eliminate jobs, but rather upgrade existing positions and create new jobs in the medium term. In this way, robots becomes a part of the workforce, which gains new capacities through automation and can increase productivity. Moreover, the hours worked by robots relieve employees in terms of content and time. This allows skilled workers to concentrate on demanding assignments, while robots are carrying out the monotonous, repetitive tasks.
Overall, a robot’s performance reduces the workload on a company’s workforce. Thus, a good work-life balance is also an important argument for employee retention in times of a shortage of skilled workers.
*This case study was kindly provided to us by KUKA.
