Steve Strong is CEO of Concept Systems, a certified member of the Control System Integrators Association that specializes in automation solutions for manufacturers.
Benjamin Kurth is director of engineering at Applied Manufacturing Technologies, also a certified member of the CSIA and in the business of automated end-of-line solutions, material handling and engineering support globally.
Steve and Ben joined Smart Industry's Scott Achelpohl on the podcast to help with some no-nonsense solutions and challenged some assumptions we might have about automation. To them, easy isn't always cheap and plug-and-play is sometimes more costly and much more trouble than it's worth.
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SA: Ben, when we spoke earlier, you said that AMT does a lot of work in vision systems. I read a little bit about them, and for our audience, vision systems automation is also known as machine vision. It uses cameras and sensors to inspect products and materials in real time. This technology can be used in manufacturing and packaging to improve quality and productivity. Ben, you also said that automation is about more than body replacement. Can you elaborate on that?
Benjamin Kurth: Let's start on the first point with machine vision. What we've seen in the technology itself over the last, let's say, 10 years is not only ease of use, but a greater focus on just overall machine and ultimately vision performance. Again, you look at 10 years ago, and the products and the parts that robots interacted with had to be fixtured and held in place in a super repeatable location because that's what robots were designed for. A repeated task, monotonous, dangerous, dull, dirty environment.
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And with all of these advancements in machine vision, it just allows a non-repeatable part to be in a non-repeatable location, and you're adjusting your robot positions on the fly. We do a lot in the packaging and palletizing industry, so we're dealing a lot with AI-generated padding for building pallets of products.
A lot of people are trying to do mixed pallet skew products for distribution centers and things like that. So again, you talk about the advancements in not just technology that consumers are used to on a day-to-day basis, but all those technologies are being brought into the robot and automation space. It's allowing for that general “non-precise stuff” to be now precise with robots and vision.
Now, when you talk about how automation is more than just body replacement, it kind of goes back to the title of the overall podcast itself and about bringing real ROI. A lot of our customers, and I'm sure, Steve, you're seeing this a lot, plants and facilities that we go and talk to, they're having a hard time just making their product because they can't even get people to show up to work.
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When you talk about ROI, a lot of what we're seeing is the ROI is calculated and makes up for itself just on the ability to keep your plant running and producing. So again, you talk about five or 10 years ago, a lot of it was “How can I move a person to do a higher-level task in my facility?” So now, I don't have a body picking up a box and putting it down or moving a part from A to B. I can have a robot do that. And headcount reduction was the biggest thing. Nowadays, there's a whole lot more that goes into that ROI calculation than just headcount reduction.
SS: I think you've made a really important point of the complexity of the ROI calculation. I think that the most interesting space here is when we get into general manufacturing, the midsize, low-volume, high-mix manufacturers out there who have traditionally not been able to meet the ROI requirements they have either because they're a small business and they need something that turns around quick or because their process wasn't as well understood. The technology that's developed over the last decade, 15 years, hasn't necessarily been the robot itself or the conveyance itself or anything. A PLC still does what a PLC did 20 years ago.
But the technology surrounding it, vision systems, AI more and more, all of those peripheral things, the sensing side of it, has become so much more robust and so much more capable in the recent past to where it's opened up a different ROI calculation because you can achieve that flexibility in a high-mix, low-volume environment.
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It's exciting times, to be honest. You can buy a robot, you can put a sense package together, you can get the conveyance right, and you can manage some, not all, there's limits to everything, of course, but you can really bring an ROI to a customer that in the past simply couldn't afford to do it because they didn't understand their process well enough or they couldn't constrain their process well enough within the boundaries of the technology that was available.
