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AUTOMATED SYSTEMS IS AUTOMATION ALWAYS THE ANSWER?


Roy Green, MD, Harford Control, casts an expert eye over the realities of industrial automation


much of this automation will become normal during the next decade, as so much has done during the past decade. But is all automation either beneficial or desirable? Last week, I saw a YouTube video of a robot


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serving beer, which looked very hygienic but not very quick and not, may I suggest, the first choice of many social drinkers. As several commented, when this beer serving Robot reached LinkedIn, ‘Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should’. The humour aside, many manufacturers have


learned the hard way that ‘just because they could, didn’t mean they should.’ During the past couple of decades or so, we


have seen many attempts at automation, some of which have been very successful, but many of which have failed or at least failed to achieve the anticipated objectives and return on investments (ROI). This is especially pronounced within the food and drink industry. The lack of ROI seems to be on the increase,


though this might be due to an increased willingness to be open about actual outcomes, as opposed to expected improvements, and how the investment has simply added cost rather than value to the bottom line. At the same time, the expected reduction in personnel, which was part of the original cost/benefit analysis and justification, just hasn’t happened. One of the problems is that the retailers (often


the primary recipients of the manufacturers’ products) want more frequent deliveries of smaller quantities to maximise shelf life for them, but also to reduce their stocking levels. Automation, on the other hand, works best with nice long batch runs, rather than frequent changeovers or label changes. Naturally, short batch runs and frequent


product changeovers leave manufacturers looking for other ways to reduce costs and improve the bottom line. An obvious first step is to ask the retailers to pay more or take larger quantities, or both. This is especially poignant now with the increase in energy prices which, for many producers, have quadrupled during the past 12 months and, it seems, worse is yet to come. Such manufacturers were already coping with increased raw materials costs, mandated annual wage increases for those on minimum wage, the very sector usually responsible for product processing and packaging. When these manufacturing co-packers go to


their large retail clients, in desperation, to agree an increase in the selling/buying in prices, if they are not told ‘no, we have our own enforced energy coupled with mandated annual


ith PPMA once again upon us, we will no doubt see a never-ending display of automation. Many would agree that


increases to minimum wage’, they might be met with ‘show us what you have done to increase your efficiencies since the last round of increases and we might consider it, but we are certainly not going to pay for your continuing inefficiency’. When faced with such challenges, the


manufacturer is bound to turn to the immediate and obvious ‘reducing the head count’. Having done this so much in the past, reducing the head count is no longer an option without the risk of cutting corners in manufacturing and risking sub-standard product, causing more rejects, rework, scrap and, if the product has already been dispatched, another costly recall. Inevitably the manufacturer turns to


automation, perhaps with some success in spite of a long ROI. If this works well enough, it might allow the eventual reduction in head count, without the risk of a quality compromise. Some ‘quick wins’ would be autocoding, and even auto line set up, where the product specifications and label changes only required changes to the software parameters which could all be achieved with minimal operator involvement, other than calling up, through the keyboard, another product. This might need the manual intervention of a label reel change and/or the adjustment of guide rails to suit.


Automation – small beginnings This limited application of automation is seen by many as the minimum requirement as it virtually eliminates operator set-up errors and can reduce changeover times. These simple automation checks can improve efficiency especially as the whole line can be set up through no more than the ‘call up’ of a product from the database, removing the need to go to each in-line machine in turn to set it up. In a line with say 10 product or label changes per shift, such ease of set-up reduces errors and increases accuracy, and could save say 15 minutes per changeover. Without the deployment of such simple automated assistance, such lines can spend more of an 8- hour shift in ‘downtime’, than in production. Problems often arise when companies


attempt to take such automation to the next level by, for example, reducing the number of line operators to further justify the introduction of another filler/packing machine that promises even greater speed. One thing, in our experience, that


manufacturers often forget is the need for total process optimisation and line balancing. Many will boast to us that their OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is around 80%. When we do our Gemba factory walkthroughs, we


often find that they are calculating OEE incorrectly, by leaving out their product changeover times or perhaps leaving out Availability entirely, or not including Quality, so what their OEE consists of is little more than ‘Performance’, i.e. the number of packs produced within a given period, “so should have produced 1,000 packs in the hour but we only got 800. And we had a few rejects, better knock off another 20 packs for quality wastage, so our OEE is about 78%.” It doesn’t get much less scientific than that! For OEE to be meaningful, we have to take


into account the processing area, otherwise it is easy to have batches of product awaiting packaging because, good as the packaging might be, the batch processing is faster. So, we would say that, line balancing to include the whole of the processing area, from goods inwards to finished products, must be taken into account. Where this isn’t done, an improvement in one part of the process will cause a bottleneck further along the process. When this happens in chilled ready meals


for example, where premixed sauces are prepared, if the sauce processing area gets too far ahead of itself, then because the product cannot be used in time, it can be wasted, even though the OEE in the packaging area still looks good. These problems are everywhere and they


are likely to be more frequently experienced due to supermarkets’ demands. More appropriate for such applications where frequent changeovers is the norm, is to find automated processes that help to achieve faster product/label changeovers.


Harford Control www.harfordcontrol.com


SEPTEMBER 2022 | PROCESS & CONTROL 41


A beer serving robot. But should serving drinks be an efficient function, or should it remain a social occasion?


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