Feature Article Continued from pg 29
3. Creation of a Career Growth Path: Automation has enabled us to provide a growth path that previously did not exist, allowing our employees to be productive and trained for other value-added processes within the wax department and other departments within the company. Year to Date, we have hired four new employees to work on the automation equipment in our wax room. Two of them have already transitioned into entry-level machine technicians.
4. Increased Standards for Hiring:
Because of automation, we have increased our standards for who we will hire, replacing warm bodies with driven talent. This approach has enabled us to attract employees who are enticed by technology but do not have the background or job history that allows them a hands-on technical career.
Benefits of Automation in the Wax Room We have as a part of our business a
Technology Center where we support our customers with pattern injection, pattern assembly, and process development. We specialize in duplicating our customers’ processes with their materials and their work instructions. We then collaborate with them to automate these processes. Most of the customers we work with are job shops who have low volume short run production. We saw an opportunity to take our knowledge of automation and develop an assembly solution with a 5-assembly break even when compared to manual assembly. We collaborated with several customers using their real parts and production requirements and realized the following benefits: 1. Dramatically reduced one-time tooling costs from over $15,000 to under $500 when compared to traditional automated pattern assembly. This is a 98% reduction!
2. Less than one hour to set up and begin production of a brand-new part number.
3. The process lives in the machine, not in the operator, or the process
engineer.
4. On-the-fly adjustments to the standards, such as adjusting spacing, number of parts on a runner bar, and orientation with no robot programming.
5. User friendly controls for set up and operation with no robot training necessary.
6. Training a new operator to run the new job in about 10 minutes.
7. In about two hours, a new operator can be taught how to set up a new job recipe.
Conclusion Automation can have a positive impact as an employee development platform in the new “difficult-to-hire-and- retain” world we now live in. Through automation, the employee onboarding process can be transformed, reducing recruiting dollars and efforts, training dollars and hours, retention dollars and efforts all while increasing profits, customer satisfaction, competitiveness and reducing lost business opportunities.
34 ❘ January 2024 ®
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