By Alberto Moel, Vice President Strategy and Partnerships, Veo Robotics

Since the beginning of the year, our blog has focused on how the Veo FreeMove^TM system can enable various forms of flexibility in manufacturing—flexibility that has quantifiable economic value such as the ability to respond to varying demand profiles and changes in product specifications.

As we discussed in the last blog post on Saginaw Steering Gear, the ability to quickly retool a factory to change what it produces is necessary and sometimes vital—a subject that is currently of intense and sustained interest for manufacturers, governments, and policy makers.

In today’s post we take a step back to collect all that we’ve been talking about with respect to manufacturing flexibility in one place and summarize the benefits of the Veo FreeMove^TM system, tying it with a bow before we shift gears to more macro manufacturing trends.

But first, a review of the fundamentals

Our fundamental assertion is that full-on automation is inflexible and fragile, and that high levels of automation can be terribly uneconomic. We also firmly believe that an all-human manufacturing approach is suboptimal under many reasonable conditions—the best outcome is a mix of humans and machines safely working together.

The underlying economic reason is that combining the complementary strengths of humans and machines gives the entire system valuable flexibility to respond to changing conditions and uncertainty.

If your manufacturing process is fully flexible, it will be able to easily and quickly ramp production up or down depending on demand, and that adjustment can be done costlessly so that unit economics are not affected. If, on the other hand, your process is inflexible, adjusting production volumes up or down will entail costly rigamarole (e.g., additional fixturing and programming, maybe a change of process) and your unit economics will be negatively affected.

The takeaway from all of this is that production flexibility has value, and its value is highest when you’re uncertain about your process requirements and lowest when you are certain. Of course, if you don’t need flexibility in your manufacturing process, its value is zero. But we’ve never come across a situation where that was the case. And our view is that the need for flexibility is increasing as product variability increases and production runs get shorter.

This doesn’t only apply to demand variations; it covers any system or process variable for which you have an uncertain outcome—cost structure, technology evolution, production prices, or even uncertainty as to what you’re supposed to be making. And as humans are infinitely flexible, one of the easiest ways to incorporate flexibility is to have more (not less) human input into the manufacturing process.

Building flexibility into your production processes by making them safe for human and machine collaboration is almost always going to be the most cost-effective choice.

Using tools like the Veo FreeMove^TM system, you will be able to automate the tasks that are most efficiently done by machines while retaining the flexibility of human workers to safely manage tasks that require adaptability, dexterity, and judgment.

Essentially, the FreeMove^TM system provides many of the benefits of fully automated and fully manual approaches, without many of the costs each of those approaches entail.

The three benefits of Veo

But how, exactly? The Veo FreeMove^TM system provides three very specific and quantifiable sources of value:

Lower overall workcell design and time costs, and lower overall capex, with the side benefit of faster and lower-cost reconfiguration and redesign;
Faster fault recovery; and
New forms of working and human-machine collaboration not possible before, such as dual fixturing or in-cycle human-machine interaction.

Lower workcell capex, and lower design and time costs

You’ll recall (we hope) that, in collaboration with Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) ¹ and a major manufacturer of consumer-packaged goods, we developed detailed models of four palletizing alternatives: a fully manual approach, a fully automated approach, a PFL robot-based palletizer, and the Veo FreeMove ^TM solution.

After examining the capital expenditures and commissioning metrics required to get the four different palletizing solutions up and running, we concluded (surprise!) that the Veo solution is 40% less expensive to install than the other automated solutions, while retaining a short process cycle time, a much shorter payback time, and quicker design, development, and implementation times. The Veo FreeMove ^TM solution’s speed and lower costs also had benefits when it came to reconfiguring (i.e., recommissioning) the palletizing workcell.

Faster fault recovery

In the second part of our palletizing case study we looked at the impact the frequency and duration of faults have on per-unit economics. When a fault occurs with a traditional fully automated palletizer, the workers monitoring the system must complete a series of steps that could take over 10 minutes. First the workers must stop the system, then they must find the person with the key, open the door of the robot’s cage, reset the fault, exit the cage, verify that no one is in the cage, lock the door, write the fault up in the logbook, and then restart the system.

With the Veo solution, the robot is not caged and human workers can quickly and safely step in to correct faults in just a couple of minutes. Quicker fault recovery enables some serious savings both in regards to per-pallet costs and overall factory throughput. Because both the fully automated palletizer and the Veo palletizer are “driven” off the same robot palletizer arm and therefore produce the same throughput, we can clearly see the stark impact shorter or longer fault recovery times have on productivity.

Every time the palletizer is down, it becomes a bottleneck for the rest of the system. Assuming a 10-minute fault recovery time for the fully automated palletizer, the decline in number of pallets per shift as a function of faults per hour is quite steep. And that lost throughput could result in a big revenue loss. On the other hand, assuming a one-minute fault recovery time with the Veo solution, although the number of pallets per shift necessarily declines as the number of faults per hour increases, the lost throughput is minimal.

New forms of working and human-machine collaboration

When humans and high-speed and payload robots are able to work in close proximity, they can complete tasks in parallel that would otherwise need to be done in isolation, improving the efficiency of production lines. We’ve discussed several potential examples of this: In our dual-fixturing human-robot collaboration case study we modeled a bushing installation application where the robot loads and unloads heavy automotive suspension knuckles while a human installs the bushings. This arrangement would reduce cycle time compared to a fully manual setup and take just a few seconds longer than a fully automated one.

Similarly, in the palletizer case study, humans handle some of the tasks the robot palletizer cannot, such as installing bumpers. This in-cycle human-machine interaction saves design time and effort, and the elimination of a complicated and fidgety $175,000 custom veeblefetzer to put bumpers on pallet corners.

At this point, commercial state of the art safety systems do not allow for this kind of safe human-robot interaction. The Veo FreeMove^TM solution, once certified and widely available, will enable the development of such applications.

The bottom line

Veo FreeMove^TM introduces flexibility in manufacturing processes that reduces costs across the board while granting manufacturers the ability to respond to all kinds of demand fluctuations. Close collaboration between humans and machines will define the future of this industry.

If you’re not convinced by now that flexibility in manufacturing is incredibly valuable, it might be a good idea to go back and re-read our blog from the start.

We’ll be back with more of our regularly scheduled programming in a couple weeks, but in the meantime, get in touch with us if you’re interested in learning more about what Veo FreeMove^TM could do for your specific application.

Manufacturing Flexibility: The Benefits of Veo FreeMove