Under the environment of increasingly fierce market competition, there is continuous pressure on manufacturing enterprises in terms of price reduction and operational efficiency improvement. If only one product is produced, it is easy to determine where improvements in the process can improve efficiency. However, if several different products are produced at the same time, just improving one process may not have a significant impact on the return on investment.

High hybrid plants produce many different parts simultaneously, each with a different manufacturing process, such as CNC machining, stamping, visual inspection and picture archiving. All of this requires some degree of human involvement (loading/unloading parts, packing parts, taking and saving pictures, etc.). Overhauling automated processes can be costly, and low or unpredictable quantities for any one component can make unit costs huge, making decisions difficult for management. Adding automation to highly mixed production processes is challenging. The foundation of any highly hybrid operation is the concept of transition time. Any effort toward automation must take into account the non-value-added time associated with transformation, or eliminate them altogether. With that in mind, here are the possible paths to automation in a highly mixed environment.

The challenge of improving high-mix production lines

For traditional fixed automation systems, the options available are almost endless, including industrial robots, gantry cartesian robots, conveyor belts, and even turnkey machines designed by integrators. Such solutions are usually fixed for the control of multiple products in one or mixed production.

On the positive side, the "tailor-made" nature of such solutions means that they tend to be very effective for the process of deploying it. If the cycle time must be much less than 2 seconds, then traditional automation may be the easiest way to improve the process flow.

However, in a highly mixed environment, fixed automation often means a decision between a lower capital investment (involving only a few products) or a higher capital investment (being able to handle all of the company's products). Traditional systems are often designed with a focus on yield rather than speed and flexibility, so tool transitions can take considerable time, especially when security protocols require physical separation from people. The total cost of ownership is often high when considering the security equipment, footprint, and setup required for traditional security approaches. In any case, this prolongs the return on investment cycle in a high-mix environment, especially when yields are relatively low.

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(Source: Control Engineering Network)