Company insight
At Dynamic Group, a cobot tends a complete injection moulding machine cycles for medical devices with heat-sensitive components. It picks and places ‘book frames’, transports the units to a trimming fixture, places it in front of an operator for further handling, and activates the cycle again.
improving the program to achieve better quality and precision,” he says. Nichrominox saw an ROI on the robots in 14 months and intends to keep transforming its production lines with additional cobots.
‘book frames’ that hold pieces to be moulded into the injection moulding machine, transports the units to a trimming fixture, places the part in front of an operator for further handling, and finally pushes a button to activate the cycle again.
“Having this type of success out of the gate as first- time rookies at this stuff has been phenomenal and totally unexpected. Our return on investment was less than two months, and we can even go further because we’re able to adapt the robots to other products so quickly.”
Joe McGillivray, Dynamic Group Bridge the gap
Dynamic Group is a privately owned, Minnesota-based contract manufacturer that specialises in complex injection moulded plastic components and assemblies for the medical and electronics industries. With the challenge of low unemployment and high wages, the company looked to automation to improve its competitiveness. A cobot tends a complete injection moulding machine cycle for a medical device with extremely heat- sensitive components: it picks and places
CEO Joe McGillivray says, “We were having trouble making one good part with manual labour, let alone the various shifts tending the machine cycle differently. Universal Robots’ UR10 robot arm gave us a perfectly consistent cycle. We went from having three operators on a single shift to being able to run three shifts per day with just one operator per shift. So, we essentially quadrupled our production capacity and our scrap went from significantly high to near zero.”
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com
Dynamic Group deployed two additional cobots to transport delicate parts to degating and human inspection, and for a kitting application that picks and places sterile wipes and saline solution into a clamshell container and pushes the loaded shell on to a conveyor – a task that previously required six to seven employees. “It was fast-paced and very high volume. It wasn’t sustainable. Now, we’re able to run it with as little as two people,” says McGillivray. “Having this type of success out of the gate as first-time rookies at this stuff has been phenomenal and totally unexpected. Our return on investment was less than two months, and we can even go further because we’re able to adapt the robots to other products so quickly.” Cobots are a new class of robots that are bridging the gap between fully manual assembly and fully automated manufacturing lines. This has become a critical competitive advantage for small and mid-sized speciality medical device manufacturers. Key benefits include flexible deployment, safe operation alongside human workers, easy programming and implementation, and fast return on investment. ●
www.universal-robots.com 63
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