Bridging the Skills Gap: Automation Productivity Boosters

Workforce woes plague most of us, and this adds further incentive to implement automation. Of course the potential to increase productivity by 30% or more is pretty appealing too. What many don’t realize is that you can make or break your productivity gains by checking and optimizing your surrounding tools and processes. Watch this video and learn about 5 key automation considerations that will minimize your process pains and boost your productivity gains.

The Dollars are in the Details

Make sure you get the most from automation by addressing these important areas first, and automation will give you at least a 30% throughput improvement:

1. Look at Workholding: It needs to be agile and adaptable to what you want to do in your quick changing. You also need to think about the end-of-arm tooling on your automation system – how does it adapt to the parts you’re going to produce?
2. Stage and Monitor Tooling: Make sure your assemblies are set up and staged, ready to go. You should also be monitoring the tool life of these assemblies. You can consider using an adaptive system that monitors loads that are being put on that tool – this will assist in the automation process.
3. Optimize Gaging: Make sure you’re getting feedback into the CNC machine as quickly as possible, and take advantage of auto comp with whatever gage system you’re using.
4. Watch Your Chip Control: Automation can only do its job if chips are out of the way, so make sure they’re cleared out or you will stop.
5. Check Material Infeed and Outfeed: When you’re increasing your throughput by 30%, or even doubling it, you need to have a good material infeed and outfeed system to make automation work.

To see our video blog that demonstrates this pre-automation checklist, visit http://www.okuma.com/5-step-pre-automation-checklist-video.