Robotic Welding Journey

Transcription

1 CONCRETE INNOVATIONS AND ANSWERS Robotic Welding Journey

2 Challenges of the late 1990 s Strong market conditions Significant growth opportunities Overloaded support departments Significant employee overtime Violated process lead times Era of controlled chaos

3 Survival required getting help Divide and conquer approach Looked to out source a portion of our pre-pouring activities Mold / form work Cage assembly Welded / fabricated steel

4 Developed suppliers Each commodity type required qualifying venders to perform to our needs Once established, work continued with gradually improving in house resources and capability.

5 Progress made thru 2002 Improvements in process flows eliminated need for supplemental cage assembly help Increased staffing in the mold shop improved their capacity Weld shop was still challenged

6 Additional efforts required Hiring welders was difficult Dollars spent on outsourcing had become significant Labor, in general, was becoming more scarce

7 Clean sheet approach Evaluated options Hire and train Transfer and train / backfill Other suppliers / reduce $ing Automate

8 Evaluated options Worries about retention after conducting welding training New sourcing trials yielded quality concerns with minimal pricing advantages Automation seemed best choice

9 Investigated robotic vendors Found brand popularity to be linked to regional markets Wanted local support availability Needed guidance on approach Made two selections to pursue

10 Started education process Learned about constraints Created part families / groupings Looked at re-engineering some components for commonality Gathered hard data on our manual production costs

11 Vendor s projected costs Determined arc and total machine times for 16 specific parts We complimented that with anticipated material handling time Compared this to current costs

12 Developed sufficient savings A spreadsheet matrix was built comparing the 3 cost bases of robot, in house, and out sourced pricing Annual volumes were plugged in and a robot project was viable

13 Next Steps Develop tooling requirements Determine material handling to and from Find a production space Assemble final project dollars

14 Patience is a virtue Once committed to moving forward, we took approx. 9 months to work through all the details and the robot and fixtures were delivered. We were still going to source some pre-cut steel pieces

15 Starting up Wanted to focus on highest volume parts first to maximize payback period This resulted in 3 part families out of the 5 being priority. The 3 families comprised 10 parts

16 Trials and tribulations This was not as easy as programming the clock on your VCR (or DVD) player Our primary operator and a back up had multi-day offsite training to become proficient

17 Trials and tribulations One part family gave us fits to finally figure out how to fixture effectively but our operator did it We continue to invest in fixturing and expand the parts being welded by the robot

18 Scheduling and run hours Our justification was based on annual volume of consumed parts We wanted to produce in a just-in time fashion in small lot sizes Tooling change over is very quick We developed cube based lots

19 Pictures of the process

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27 CONCRETE INNOVATIONS AND ANSWERS 2008 PCI Convention Thank You. Questions?