DIGITILISATION | TECHNOLOGY REPORT
R Automated handling of railway wheels by Güdel
Thompson is a man who has advised companies on how much to automate and how best to automate, from large-scale and heavy lifts to small-scale and light ones. “Güdel can supply up to 3.1t lifting capacity off the shelf,” he says. “We have recently done a project where the loads are well over 4t. The loads are railway wheels, and the system lifts them around as if they were biscuits.” Typical, and relatively simple, tasks
for easy automation, he says, are warehousing and distribution. “If you think of it from a distribution centre perspective, which is one of many applications, boxes or crates arrive and you need to depalletize them and stack maybe dozens of components or products until they are ready to go on to their next destination. “And you need to put the heavy stuff at
the bottom, for stability; but you must also arrange the stack so that the next item that is needed is not at the bottom. And there can also be different sizes, shapes and so on of the commodities as well, so you must programme that in; you do that differently for each client. And there
32 | August 2021 |
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are other things you have to do such as conform with machinery directives and safety rules,” adds Thompson. All of this can be fairly routinely
automated. “It is astonishing how many companies still have three or four people huddled round an end-of-line conveyor where they are picking up boxes and putting them on pallets. That gives them health and safety issues around manual handling. They have Repetitive Strain Injury risks, again because of the manual handling. And it is not very efficient, especially when it comes time for lunch break and the people go off duty and the whole place grinds to a halt.” So automating that simple lift-and-
stack-and-pass-the-component-on process will save the labour cost of three or four jobs? Not so, he says. “It does not automatically remove people. A lot of companies go into an automation plan thinking ‘Right, I’m going to get rid of three-quarters of my workforce.’ What you actually find out as you continue the journey is that you end up with probably the same headcount but they are doing
different jobs. And they are probably more interesting jobs, and jobs of more value, as well. We tend to try to automate the more dull, the more dangerous, the more demanding positions first.” In most factories that will include the lifting and carrying functions. “Your machine operatives, whatever task they are doing, will find the components they need delivered to them with no outside help, and without having to stop and fetch it themselves, so they can concentrate on the job in hand,” he says. What do you need to automate your lifting? Data is one thing; it is supplied by the new generation of sensors which can tell you everything from the position of the hook and the load to whether an incautious bystander is wandering too near your overhead gantry. Software is another need; and Thompson adds a third: “You need to have a vague idea of what you are doing. “The biggest problem a lot of companies make when they start the automation journey is that they choose the hardest thing in the factory to
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