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AUTOMATION & ROBOTICS
preventative maintenance. We work with our customers to schedule any required maintenance at a time that’s least disruptive to their business, maximising equipment uptime.
4. REPAIR The longer a machine is out of action, the greater the financial impact on your business. Speak to your supplier to find out what their average engineer response times are. FANUC UK is currently sitting at a sub-20 hour mean time to repair any faults, i.e., less than one business day.
5. DOWNTIME Preventing downtime to minimise production losses is essential. As well as ensuring your automation supplier offers preventative maintenance and short repair times, the best way to keep downtime to a minimum is to invest in equipment which has a reputation for reliability. Ask your automation supplier for evidence of its products’ mean time between failure (MTBF). For example, the MTBF for our CNC range is 25 years, and for our robots it’s even longer, at 32 years. Make sure you also find out from your automation supplier what services are available to support reduced downtime occurrences, such as augmented reality 24-hour support helplines.
6. UPGRADES With technology evolving at a rapid rate, your automation supplier should be able to equip
your purchase with the latest smart software upgrades as they are released. At FANUC, these include our Zero Downtime (ZDT) programme, which tracks our machines when operational and feeds back performance data to ourselves and the customer. This helps to predict potential issues ahead of time, keeping downtime to a minimum.
7. SECURITY Hand in hand with technological advancements comes cybersecurity. Ensuring that your equipment, as well the data it handles and produces, are kept secure is a pre-requisite and something that we take extremely seriously. Make sure your automation supplier can clearly explain their cybersecurity measures to help your business avoid a costly cyber breach.
8. ENERGY No longer a ‘nice to have’, sustainability is now a business imperative from a financial, environmental, social and governance (ESG), and legislative perspective; not to mention essential for winning and retaining key contracts. As well as questioning the energy efficiency of any automation solution in terms of the electricity and gas it consumes, make sure to also find out its credentials regarding water usage, particularly when it comes to keeping the equipment clean. However, some solutions go even further and actually re-use energy within the process. For example, our all-electric ROBSHOT injection moulding machine has an
advanced power regeneration feature that enables intelligent energy recovery, meaning it consumes 10-15 per cent less energy than other all-electric machines.
9. END OF LIFE Everything has a cost to recycle, so you’ll also need to factor in a plan for when your product reaches the end of its life. Of course, this will be determined by its expected lifespan. Will you need to recycle it and purchase a replacement in five years’ time or in 10, 15 or 20 years’ time? At FANUC, our philosophy is to offer the lowest total cost of ownership for our products with extended lifetime service. This means we commit to supporting our products for as long as the customer wishes to use them. We are still supporting robots and machines that are over 30 years old.
CONCLUSION To conclude, if UK manufacturing is to retain its place as a global powerhouse, we must increase our levels of automation. This requires a shift in focus by all stakeholders within a business towards purchasing the right equipment first time around and looking at the overall value it can deliver. Prioritising TCO – rather than obsessing over a short payback period – will help to ensure long-term success, supporting a business’ growth strategy to deliver higher productivity and ultimately, higher profitability.
FANUC UK
www.fanuc.eu/uk/en
FACTORY&HANDLINGSOLUTIONS | JULY/AUGUST 2024 11
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