Technology Integration and its Profound Impact for Manufacturers

All right. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. I really appreciate everybody taking time out of your busy day to join us here this afternoon. So today I’m going to go through kind of the building blocks, if you will, of what you need to look at in terms of integrating automated processes into your system. So this is basically my agenda slide. This is going to be the roadmap here for what I’m going to talk through this afternoon. We’re going to touch on industry pressures, where we see the growth, types of automation in terms of what we use from custom integration versus OEM type automation, and then what I really spend the bulk of my time on is really the considerations, things that a lot of times people overlook when they’re looking at adding automation into their process and then we’ll go through a quick overview of a justification example where you can see some of the return on that investment.

So some of the common pressures of industry - I’m not going to read bullet point for bullet point. Everybody here can read faster than what I’m speaking - but the general consensus, if you will, is I get to talk to thousands of machine shops every year and there’s a common platform, if you will, that I hear from customers over and over of areas that they struggle in or areas that they are feeling pressure on a daily basis. When you look through all these bullet points, at the end of it is, “How do we do more with less? How do we get more productive with our processes? How do we do more of what we currently have? How do we bridge the skills gap?” So some of the things that’s common in the industry, everybody has people, every machine shop has equipment and tooling, everybody deals with certain types of materials, and everybody has financial resources or at times financial restraints depending on what the situation is. So these four bullet points really encompass the level playing ground that everybody is on but what really sets manufacturers apart from their competition are really your individual unique processes. What is it that you do different that sets you apart from the job shop next door or your leading competitor that you’re going to market against day in/day out? So your processes and what you do, your intellectual property, if you will, is what really is going to set apart your manufacturing process from those that you compete against.

So one of the things I talk to customers a lot on whenever I go to visit machine shops is what is their current spindle utilization? Sometimes it’s shocking. I will say there’s definitely a big trend as people are taking on and embracing software that’s helping them to automatically collect this data but most people think that they’re running a higher spindle utilization than what they truly are once they start measuring it. So this is a survey that was done based on 100 plants, both large manufacturing facilities as well as small - what we consider your 20 people and under job shops, to see out of 100 shops what is their average spindle utilization and that came out to 34%. So roughly speaking, just round numbers, a manned machine where you’ve got an operator running that machine will typically run 3,000 hours out of an available 8,000 hours of available over the course of the year. So that 34%, that’s the number that we want to look at. How do we drive that forward? How do we increase that number and get up into 50%, 60%, 80%, and higher ranges? As we look at employment throughout the nation, the continental US has a really good growth pattern right now. So one of the talking points – I like this information. I like seeing maps like this. One, I like to see growth. That’s good for the overall economy. It’s good for the country but I’m one of them. I’m sure there’s many on the phone today that lived through the 2008- 2009 timeframe and even during that time when times are really tough, really lean, there were people losing jobs, there was a lot of unemployment. Even during that time machine shop after machine shop that I went and visited and worked with had a common theme that they couldn’t hire skilled labor. Even during the time when the recession was in its kind of full stride, people had a hard time finding skilled labor. Today, it’s even that much worse because the economy is strong. The growth employment throughout the nation is really strong. You look at the southeast and the southwest especially has seen tremendous employment growth, so it’s even harder to find that skilled labor and that’s where automation starts becoming a primary focus for companies like us who’s actually OEM machine builder. We start looking at, “Okay. How do we help bridge that skilled labor gap?” As we look at the automation industry as a whole, the graph on the left, that blue line at the top, this is representing machine tools and then the line on the bottom, the orange line, is representing the machine tools with automation that’s sold. So even though sometimes the machine market appears to have kind of a flat trajectory, the automation side of it has been growing. You look at the graph on the right, you can see a steady growth trajectory across the board of automated equipment that’s been purchased from 2011 through 2017. This is just a very nice linear growth trend, if you will.

So I’m going to step through the types of automation that we typical look at on a day to day basis with customers. I’m going to start with the very simple. Most machine shops, anywhere you go you’re going to see bar feeders hooked to a lathe. This is sometimes overlooked from an automation perspective. However, there’s a lot of times we’ll go in and look at what our customers doing when he’s slugging parts or loading in individual unique castings and you start looking at the process that he’s doing and where his bottleneck is a lot of times on the set up time and many times we can look at ways that we can get multiple types of parts out of one common platform and bar feed those applications and we can whittle chips faster than you can have a machine down in the middle of a changeover process. So many times when we’re just looking at how do we make these incremental steps to increase productivity, a lot of times it’s looking at an application that a guy may not be bar feeding and we can look at that at a bar feeder and actually change his mentality of how he’s making parts currently. The picture to the right, that’s a horizontal on the FMS system, Flexible Manufacturing System. Typically we work with companies like Fastems from an FMS standpoint but this is an area where you could tie in a single horizontal or vertical or five axis machine and then grow as your business is growing. You could plug in multiple machines and keep adding these pallet systems, so that’s an area that we look at. These are typically - I’m going to say in a broad brush stroke - typically third party type options. These are bar feeders were built from companies like Edge, LNS, IEMCA, the Fastems FMS system would be something we would use with horizontals. There’s companies like Liebherr that offer very similar systems, so those are areas that most companies – even ones that are painted and they look like the match the machine, generally speaking, they’re built by a third party company and integrated into that system. Then we look at OEM. What I’m going to kind of build is the OEM type automation systems. Generally speaking, we’re looking at pallet pools on machining centers and then a gantry or other types of robotic type loading on turning centers whether it’s multifunction or straight live tool Y-axis type turning systems. So our pallet pools, these are items that we build from the factory. We bring them in and we’ll typically do pallet pool systems single, dual, or triple level. So we can go from 10, 6, 8, 12 pallets at a time and then those are typically cells that are set down in place and generally speaking, that’s one machine with one pallet system that gets added, where you look at an FMS system, you’re adding multiple machines to one linear pallet system. Gantry machines, the picture I have here, that’s one single machine or one single gantry. However, this could be an automated line where you have 6, 10, 12 machines tied in with one gantry beam with multiple arms feeding the machines coming down the line, so these can be customized depending on what the customer application is.

Generally speaking, when you say the term automation, where most people’s minds go is with the robot tending systems. So got two different versions here that I’m going to talk to. The picture that I’ve got on the left, these are what I bill as application driven automation systems, so these are custom engineered systems based on customer specific needs. So this could be again, one robot loading one machine. It could be one robot on a rail system loading multiple machines or overhead gantry beam with a robot loading multiple machines. So those can be very flexible and customized to the applications. The machine on the right, that’s showing what we call a Load & Go system from Automation Within Reach. That is a standard kitted package that has either a drawer cell or rotary type table system on it. It usually has one or two robot options - so a smaller, lighter robot capacity versus a bigger, heavier robot capacity - but the unique thing on this is that is something that really the customer can integrate on his own without needing custom automation or custom integration to the machine tool. So a Load & Go system like this one comes pre-programmed and it has a conversational language that a customer uses to actually teach or teach is not the right word but tell the robot what type of work he’s loading. Is he loading bar work? Is he loading flange work? Is he grabbing the ID? Is he grabbing the OD? Once you set up a series of parameters through a conversational piece, all the robot movements going from the Load & Go to the actual center line of the table or the vice on the machining center or a chuck on a lathe or a grinder, all those systems are already pre-taught. So once you connect the interface, go through the conversational program on how you’re gripping and where you’re unloading the part, all the teach points are already set in the system to be able to plug and play to the machine tool. So we recently watched an install on the customer’s floor where they brought the system in from the time they dropped the pallet jack out from under the Load & Go system and got it unbanded, it took him four hours to have the machine into production with an automated solution so those are very unique systems to be able to use to kind of get started in automation if you’re not already using it.

So some of the considerations that you need to work through when you’re looking at how are you going to automate your process or what the correct process should be to automate. So these are just a bullet list that I go through every time I’m working on a project with a customer. We start at the top and kind of work our way down. We start looking at: What type of machine does the customer have? Are they reliable enough for the process that he’s doing? Obviously, if you’re trying to hold tenths and the machine tools you have will only hold accuracy that you can measure with a tape measure, you got a problem right from the start so you want to make sure you have a good repeatable, reliable machine tools and then you got to look at the strategy. What’s your strategy for actual production? That starts from looking at: What is your short term goals as well as what are your long term goals? What are you doing the next three to six months? Then what are you doing in the next five to ten years? Where are you trying to take the company? Make sure you’re putting a system in place so that it’s going to help you get to where your long term goals are. We’re going to work our way through fixtures, cutting processes, coolants. Making sure we’ve got all of the variables controlled. Any time we’re automating, first thing we got to do is make sure we have control of all the variables. If you have something that you don’t have control on, you will not be able to successfully automate that process. So when I talk about coolants and fluid for an example, a lot of that has to do with chip control. If you’re producing long, stringy chips that are not repeatable, you can’t automate that process. You need to be able to break chips and have small chips that are manageable and breakable that’s repeatable that you can be able to automate that process with. If you’re getting stringers and one out of every 25 parts, you’re going to have a problem if you try to automate that system. Then we get into quality. Having a closed feedback loop is very important, scheduling, tracking, being able to visualize and see what’s taking place on the floor and communication. Communication – whether you’re talking about dealing with people or if you’re a manager trying to manage a team or whether you’re trying to talk about machine tools and automating systems, the root cause of most failures comes down to communication and being able to have good solid communication ahead of time before problems happen.

So let’s peel the onion a little bit and talk about the strategy. I’m a big fan of multifunction machines. Obviously, at Okuma we produce a very broad line of various multifunction machines. However, that’s not the answer for every process that’s in the manufacturing world today. There’s many times you can look at a process and go, “Oh, that’s a great part to be on a mill turn machine,” but if you look at the long term goals and the strategy of what the company’s trying to accomplish, there’s cases that can be made where you need to say, “You know what? Instead of doing that all and done one time machine, we need to go back to Op 10, 20, 30, 40 type set up and work out a production system.” So this again, goes back to what do you need that’s going to move the needle for your facility? So just a very quick, simple math routine that we do to look at what is going to be the best process? This is just an example. Obviously, your individual process is going to be a little bit different but just for an example, in this case if we’re looking at a conventional type set up, we have four machines. The set up time is nine hours. The takt time in this example is 0.9 hours versus a multifunction machine. The set up time we can drastically reduce even though sometimes the takt time may be a little bit longer. A turret lathe for example is going to change tools a whole lot faster than a mill turn lathe would, so your takt time is a little bit longer on the multifunction part but you’re saving time on that set up time because you’re able to catalog a library of tools and tool changer. You’re able to do more work in one set up, things of that nature so we reduced our setup time. So in this example, if we take our setup time over our run time, we’ve come up with a breakeven point based on these numbers. We’ve come up with a breakeven point of basically 41 parts. So that means if I’m doing parts one through 40 and then I’m changing over or I’m doing lots of 20 or 30 parts at a time, I’m going to be faster overall on a multifunction machine. However, if I’m doing lot sizes of 10,000, nope. I’m going to outrun you all day long in more of that conventional type process. So again, this is going to be different for everybody’s manufacturing system but there’s simple math that you can look at to see, “Okay, which way do I want to go?” Obviously, there’s more considerations in terms of work-in-process, fixturing, and things like that that’s got to come into play but just generally speaking, if you’re trying to get a starting point on where do I start my process? This is a great way to kind of get the ball moving.

Then we start looking at fixtures. I’m going to show a couple of different examples from workholding, and so a couple of different companies that I do a lot of work with. This example I’m talking about Jergens. Big fan of their zero point system. I like if I’m working on an automation system, I want to have as much commonality as possible. So in this example if my in the bond tooling is grabbing the same type of base plate, so my pickup diameter/my pickup location isn’t the same all the time, I don’t have to change my end of arm tooling as much. So if I can have that common platform where I’m using a base plate with a receiver and a zero point type setup, then on top I can mount any type of fixture, any type of workholding that I want and it doesn't affect what my robot end of arm tooling is. So the more I can try to standardize and have a common platform, the easier it is to move that same part or that same base plate around my shop. When I look at fixtures and workholding, I like to look at one, what is the customer trying to accomplish? Then are there better ways of doing it? So when I look at hydraulics. I do a lot of work with machining centers and horizontals and we still use a lot of through pallet hydraulics and overhead hydraulics. I will say I’m a big fan. I’ve used a lot of these fixtures that. The top fixture that’s North Hartland Tool. This is an example of an aerospace blade fixture. It’s a six point nest. The thing I like about this is that is a self-contained hydraulic fixture. So I would mount that on to that base plate of that Jergens zero point system or a SCHUNK VERO-S system. I would mount this fixture to that base plate and then my robot in the bar tooling be grabbing that base plate and moving that in and out. So then my top tooling, that can change depending on what my parts are but the thing I like about this is that can be self-contained hydraulics. I’m not dealing with overhead hydraulic systems. I’m not dealing with through pallet hydraulic systems. Any time there’s maintenance, I’m not shutting the machine down. If I spring a hydraulic leak in some form or fashion, I can quickly work on this fixture and replace an O-ring or something like that and I haven’t stopped my spindle. I can have other work and that machine’s still running so I’m just a big fan of systems like this. Any time I can simplify the amount of moving parts, the better.

As we talk about fixtures and workholding, being able to make sure that you are seated and that you have confirmation that the part is loaded correctly. This is an example of a tombstone style fixture or a base plate that would go on a tombstone. This is from Busche. We do a lot of work with Busche Workholding especially in the automotive industries, things of that nature, but incorporating air seat confirmation to provide feedback to the control to let you know before you put a cutter on that part, is that part clamped? Is it in there correctly? Was anything misloaded? Be able to catch that ahead of time is what’s going to keep that automation system running.

Chip control. I mentioned earlier about being able to control chips and make sure that you’re not leaving stringers in a lathe for example. This is another thing when it comes to machining centers, making sure you have chip control from a machining standpoint. Having built in air blows or coolant nozzles that can blast the seats of your fixtures where parts are going to be loaded, things of that nature, these are very important considerations when you’re looking at fixture designs and how are you going to hang onto that part. It’s one thing to have a fixture where you can hold the part repeatedly, but you also have to consider what contaminations could get in there when an operator’s not standing there putting his eyeball on it. So being able to have that built into that fixture system is very important.

Manual decouplers. This slide I like because one, it talks to being able to have parts where the robot can charge and uncharge the fixture on certain models. So if you’ve got a horizontal machine, you’re running on hydraulic fixtures. There’s ways that you can incorporate that into the end of arm tooling from the robot and then there’s pressure gauge indicators. There’s simple things that you can do from a fixture design standpoint. In this example, what you’re seeing there is a little button that pops out. When everything is pressurized and clamped correctly, that little pressure indicator will have a button that will pop out. You can quickly come in and have a probe touch that and say, “Okay. Is that button there? Yes. I’m clamped. Everything's correct.” If it’s not there, “Wait a minute, something’s not right and flag the machine.” Have an alarm come up. Have the operator come and check what’s going on or shuttle that part out, shuttle a different part in and send that to a setup station to have that checked out.

Part retention. Another consideration when it comes to fixturing is making sure that you have a way that you can typically spring load the part. So the robot, if you’re actually using the robot to load the work piece, have the robot bring it in, have spring retention clamps hold that part in place while the robot gets out of place, loads a second part, and then hydraulically charge these. These are very popular when it comes to your more automated high volume type production automotive environments, things of that nature.

Another consideration are redundant tools. Too many times I see the automation cells in the field and the utilization is not as high as what a customer would like and when you start boiling down to the root problem, it’s because the machine is sitting idle waiting on an operator to come in and swap inserts or change a tool that expired, things of that nature. So being able to make sure you got a library that has multiple redundant tools is very important depending on the length of time that you’re wanting to run as well as the type of materials. If you’re running aluminum, it’s not as critical. If you’re running titanium, Inconel, it’s very critical. So those are things that you’ve got to look at. Some unique ways to get more redundant tools. My example at the top – one, if you take just a single turret lathe for an example, just simply jumping up one step of technology and going to a twin turret lathe. Even if you’re not pinch turning or doing operations where you’re trying to combine operations into a machine, adding that second turret gives you more tooling stations. You jump into what we call our LT platform where you tie in two or three turrets. Again, you’re doubling up or tripling up the amount of tool capacity that you have, so those are sometimes overlooked options and then a big one is just simply if you’re talking about a turning application, adding a Y axis to your turning machines. I’ve walked into shop after shop and we’re looking at their process and they’ve got a live tool machine that’s just an X and Z axis and you look at the incremental step in productivity gain they could accomplish simply by adding a Y axis. That not only gives you capability to do geometries that you sometimes have to take over to a mill and second op it, but it also gives you opportunities to double up or triple up the amount of tools that you have on the turret station. You could take one tool position and by shifting it in Y axis, add two or three different cutting tools into that one same pocket provided your part has the geometry that allows for that. There’s one customer that we’ve got out in Arizona and it just extremely highly intelligent machinist. He created his own tooling block and he has seven different cutting tools in each block utilizing its Y axis. Now that’s extreme. That’s way over the top. That takes somebody that’s got a lot more creativity than I’ve got but just having that one additional axis can open up a big change. Having multifunction machines – again, anything that’s got an ATC, horizontals, anything where you have an ATC capacity, you have opportunities to add multiple redundant tools. If you’re going into an FMS system, the first step is you want a large ATC typically or go to a hide system from the FMS provider so you can have multiple tools. Gain tools or flash tools are very popular as well in your mill turn style machines where you can index the milling turret or the H1 turret in our case to add multiple cutting tools in one type of tool.

I mentioned feedback. This is something very critical when it comes to automating processes. You don’t want to have the cells shut down for something - probably not the most politically correct term – but for something stupid. So in this example I’m showing just a very basic system. This is showing coolant concentration. So the picture on the left is our OSP control with Okuma monitoring system and a couple of different applications that it’s monitoring but the pictures to the right, that’s simply checking coolant concentration. So I can keep track of what’s taking place in that production cell. It’s running production. I don’t have an operator there attending it all the time but I still want to make sure I’m maintaining that machine properly, so this is one example of just something very simple to do. Another one – Way Lube. You want to get ahead of these things. if you’ve got a machine that’s constantly running out of Way Lube at 2:00 in the morning and shutting your cell down, have this monitoring system monitor that and get ahead of it and let the operator know before he leaves or your maintenance guy, whoever's taking care of fluids to know, “Hey, at 3:00 that afternoon make sure you go and add these fluids.” The monitoring system will tell you how much run time you’ve got left before you’re going to wind up shutting that cell down. A simple thing like chip conveyor. I’ve got a sensor on the shaft of the chip conveyor to confirm that that chip conveyor is turning. You don’t want to again, a stupid mistake where somebody walks away and the chip conveyor stopped or you wound up with a bird nest of chips that jammed up in a system and you overflow coolant. You’ve got coolant all over the floor and you got an automated cell shutdown because you got a $25.00 an hour guy out there mopping the floor because of something simple that could’ve been caught upfront. So these are all just different things that are very simple to monitor that sometimes are overlooked but can make a huge impact in the productivity of that automated cell.

Quality and part inspection. One of the great things of automation is you automate the cell and you can make a lot of parts. So now do you want to make a lot of good parts or do you want to make a lot of bad parts? That robot doesn't care. It’s up to you and the system that you designed to make sure that your manufacturing process is delivering good quality parts. So having in-process gaging, everything from a very simple touch probe in the machine (very, very common today) all the way to tying in - this is a picture of a Renishaw Equator - it’s a phenomenal comparator to have on the shop floor to compare parts and then tying in these systems to your tool life and your work offsets so you can trim the parts and let that system automatically make offsets as needed to keep parts in tolerance. Again, taking that out of the hands of a needed operator. Let the system do that work for you. All the technology is out there. It’s just got to be utilized. So in this case, Caron AutoComp, you set up work in process tolerances, it will trim that and when it gets to your limits that you set for your work in process, it will offset your geometries to bring it back in. If it realizes you made too many offsets, you moved it more than a predetermined amount, it will flag that tool as something’s wrong. You’ve got a broken edge or something of that nature. Call up a redundant tool or flag it for the operator to come check and see what’s taking place. So these are all systems that need to be incorporated into any type of an automated system.

Making sure you’re connected. Regardless if you’re automated or not, you should be connected and monitoring what your machines are doing. We have a software. We call it the Okuma Smart Factory. We can monitor what everybody builds – your green, yellow, red lights. Is your machine running? Is it down? Is it waiting on an operator? Things of that nature but also what machines need maintenance? Do you have a machine that’s got a maintenance issue taking place? Things of that nature. So you can send emails or alerts to flag the right people to get involved with it. Again, that’s regardless if you’re automating a system or not. Just being able to monitor and measure your productivity. We work with companies like 5ME, Freedom eLOG, Memex. These guys do a phenomenal job monitoring anything that could be basically NT connected, monitoring that equipment and providing that type of feedback. Again, going back to scheduling that maintenance. If you are talking about an automated system, you can’t ignore the maintenance and you want to build that into your process/into your system so that you don’t have unexpected downtime. You’re getting ahead of it ahead of time. It’s terrible to see a machine tool get shutdown because of something very simple that could’ve been caught two weeks earlier, so these are ways to have periodic maintenance predetermined into the control and build that into your ERP or your MRP system to be able to schedule that into your production system.

So a couple of different examples from application driven aspect. Again, these would be kind of your custom integrated systems. So this is one example. This is a pinion manufacturing whether there’s no changeover. So they’re going from I think there’s like 40 different types of part numbers and no operator does any changeover in the system. It’s bar feeding raw stock in and then the robot is unloading and then sending it to various stations. So what’s pictured here is a shop floor CMM that’s doing all the inspection. There’s cases to have engraving or laser etching if you’re doing serial tracking. You can do deburr stations, wash stations, really your imagination’s the limit of what you’re going to do in that cell depending on what your processes are. So that was the concept picture. This is kind of the picture of it in full operation and you can see a bar feeder tied to the lathe and then the shop floor CMM and then the entrance area into that robot cell has laser light curtains. So the guy gets within X amount of feet, it will slow the robot down. If you break that light curtain, it will shut that system down and wait till somebody is clear but these are custom type applications that we do a lot of cells with over the years. This is an example. Sometimes people believe that you have to have a very expensive process to justify automating it. This is an example where they are literally just turning the diameters of the ends of tubing. Probably the simplest type of machining work that you could possibly do and the machine tools was actually the cheapest part of the entire cell that got over $1 million invested in the automation system but they automate this entire process in this entire cell where it does the part picking, loads the stock, it brings it in, it does all the measuring and inspection, and these robots are mounted behind the machines and they reach over the front into the door so the operator still has full access to the front of the machine and then because this only uses one tool for the cut, they’ve got all 12 stations loaded up with redundant tools so once it hits the certain tool life horsepower draw or tool life monitoring, however you want to get it set up, it will index on to the next tool. Keep that system in the production till there’s a scheduled time where they go in and change out all those inserts at one time.

So a quick example. Pardon me, I’m losing my voice. Quick example of return on investment. Again, I try not to go too deep on this because every application is going to be different based on your needs and what you’re trying to do but this is just an example of a typical way that we go through and look at how do we go about seeing the return on that investment. So your numbers are going to look different than these numbers but again, just something we’ll put up just to kind of have the wheels turning and understand some of the things that you could look at. So certain things that you need to compare 100% production versus what your actual net production is and then looking at where is your downtime coming from? Again, that’s where a lot of the monitoring system can come into effect to see why is that spindle stopped? Again, I’m a big fan of collecting it automatically however, I grew up as an old school machinist and we did this many years ago without having computers tied to the machines. We had a white paper set out there and Sharpie markers and we would write down as soon as that spindle stopped for any reason, why was it? We would trim that over the course of a couple of weeks and then find out, “Okay, what’s repeating here and what’s the low hanging fruit that we can attack and try to drive that?” So finding out where you’re going down and then taking a look at how does this compare how we’re doing it currently versus how we would do it in an automated system. So this is just again, a typical scenario of two machines, one operator, parts coming in, parts going out. A man running the machines versus having it robot attended. So in this example we’re looking at two machines, one operator per shift, eight hours shifts working two shifts a day, working 250 days per year, and then the scheduled labor hours on that one is 4,000 hours looking at production rate parts per hour of 10 so that gives us 40,000 pieces annually and then looking at the hourly rate- and these are probably low figures - but $15.50 an hour plus 50% fringes, so that comes out to $23.00 - $25.00. So then we start looking at the percentages of where our downtimes coming in from personal relief, tool changes, etc. So we’re looking at total efficient loss on manual type operation 30% versus 10% in an automated cell. So then you look at where your productivity is if you’re running that 100% annual production. Your net annual production on this example is 28,000 pieces from a manual cell versus 36,000 in an automated cell so then when you calculate that up to come up with – at the end of the day this is where this conversation can go far away from just automation but at the end of the day what you’re trying to do is figure out how much does it actually cost you produce that part? So in this example, that part cost this company $3.32 to produce it manually versus when we do it automated, it costs $0.26 to produce that same work. So now if you look at the investment side of it, you tie in the machine tool, the inspection equipment, the automation equipment. Total capital investment is going to be more in that automated cell obviously. So in this example we’re using $200,000.00 for the automated system, so that’s added on to the inspection and the machine tool side. So you’re looking at $5.25 versus $7.25. So your annual capital investment that’s amortized $105,000.00 versus $145,000.00. Net annual production: 28,000 pieces versus 36,000 pieces. Capital cost per piece produced – you’ve got a variance there: $3.75 versus $4.03. So then as we continue to work down through those numbers, you add capital cost per piece produced. Total labor and capital parts $7.07 on a manual operation versus $4.29 in the same scenario of the automated system. So your savings on that per year is $100,000.00 and then there’s additional savings and these are unknowns. I’ll just kind of highlight them as red but you’ve got overhead cost per piece that could be looked at but then you also have capacity on that machine tool. If you’re driving your efficiencies up, you’ve got additional capacity so hopefully if you’re doing things right, what else can you do with that from that aspect? Now if you take that same scenario and add a third shift, your total parts produced jumped to 42,000 versus 54,000, so your total savings jumped up to $155,000.00 a year. So again, adding more lights out, more runtime nets more revenue at the end of the year and then again, you still have those same talking points about what can you do if you’re driving your efficiencies up and you’ve got more capacity to work with?

So in summary, automation – everything that I’ve talked about today already exists. It’s already out there. This is not new innovative things. It’s not new stuff that’s got to be engineered. Everything I talked about is off the shelf items that are proven and can be implemented today. So whether you’re talking about a gantry system on a lathe that’s coming from an OEM or you’re talking about a robot fed custom integration system, all the components that I just worked through all the way down to the software monitoring system, things of that nature, that is all off the shelf items that’s proven technology. There’s zero risk. So when you’re talking about managing a business, managing your business, that risk mitigation is huge. So everything I’ve talked about - this is proven technology ready to be implemented. So if you’ve ever consider automation, if not, take another look just because you’ve tried something one time 10 – 15 years ago and it didn’t work doesn’t mean it’s not time to take another look at it. So we’re here to help. Everybody at Okuma. All of our distributor network: Gosiger, Hartwig, Morris, Arizona CNC, EMEC, Thomas Skinner, HEMAQ down in Mexico, everybody that’s within our group, we’re here to help you move your production and your productivity and your profitability up to the next level. So if there’s anything I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Brent, that’s all for me. I’ll turn it back over to you.

Okay. So that’s a little bit of a loaded question because it’s going to be different based on the process that’s taking place. So the Load & Go system that I talk about is a kitted up system literally we just had one set on the floor and up and running on a machine in four hours from the time they put a pallet jack under it and rolled it out to the machine, got the pallet jack out and started installing it, they were making chips in four hours. That’s the extreme side of the scale on the good scale. Now, when you look at like that pipe handling system where the cutting process was real simple but the robots – I think there was five or six different robots in that cell. That takes time. That takes time to get it integrated and all the handshaking worked out, all the gaging and things like that, so that’s where I can’t say – that’s a three day process, right? That’s going to be very dependent upon the process that the customer is doing.

All right. We have time for one more question. Let’s see that is going to be: Outside of pallet pools, are there any other automation built by Okuma direct?

Okay. Very good. Thank you, Wade. That concludes today’s presentation. I want to thank Wade and Okuma for making today’s webinar possible. If we didn’t get around to your question, please feel free to email Wade directly at wanderson@okuma.com. Again, that’s wanderson@okuma.com and thanks to everyone for listening in. you should receive an email with a link to the recording soon. I’d also like to invite you to our next modern machine shop webinar on Improving Production Efficiency by Looking beyond Utilization Data. That webinar takes place this coming Tuesday, May 14th. Thank you for your time and enjoy the rest of your day.