Many American manufacturers are facing two major issues: on the one hand, labor costs remain high, which has a direct impact on product pricing and international competitiveness. On the other hand, though, many manufacturers face an acute skilled labor shortage: there just aren’t enough qualified workers to see a fully manual process flow through from end to end. In this environment, automation isn’t optional: it’s the only way forward. 

However, your automation strategy and the partners you work with can have a tremendous impact on ROI and your overall success. 

In this article, we’ll be taking a look at 

• Labor and automation costs
• Transition planning
• Embedding safety
• Energy factors
• Leveraging the right type of bots

As some of the factors, you need to consider before implementing automation for your manufacturing business.

We’ll also look at how 4D Systems accelerates the process to deliver automation solutions with positive ROI within the first 2 years of operation. Let’s get started!

Labor and Automation: Smart Planning to Leverage Both and Make Major Efficiency Gains 

Contrary to popular belief, automation solutions aren’t out there to steal blue-collar jobs. In today’s market environment, they’re a necessity to make up for the lack of skilled staff who can work on the production line.

For many 4D Systems clients, the aim behind automation isn’t necessarily to save by cutting the workforce from 250 to 100 workers. It’s more about deploying smart solutions that will allow those 100 (or fewer), available workers, in the pool to get the job done with far greater efficiency. Because fewer staff are needed for a given production task, payroll costs do come down significantly. 

While automation robots are a major capital cost center, the month-to-month savings on payroll will more than compensate in as few as 24 months. When it comes to labor, 4D System’s priority is to maximize the efficiency of the skilled workforce that’s already there, freeing up your workers to focus on higher-level tasks that need direct intervention. 

Better Planning for a Seamless Transition 

One of the biggest challenges manufacturers face is the actual transition process from a manual workflow to a fully automated system. The risk here is obvious: if transitioning means a complete or partial shutdown, that’s an opportunity cost of thousands of dollars per hour as your production line stands idle. 

Strategic transition planning with a phased approach is critical to ensure continuity and minimize downtime. At 4D Systems, we’ll analyze your process flow to understand how automation robots can be implemented in a phased, low-impact way. 

We’ll help you draw up clear scopes and timelines months ahead of implementation to mitigate the impact of change. This means you won’t have to freeze production in order to make the transition, meaning cost savings every hour as you make the move. 

Embedding Safety from the Start 

Automation planning isn’t just about continuity. Safety is an incredibly important factor. 4D Systems ensures that safety features are embedded into your transition plan, right from the beginning. 

This means that you’ll be able to make decisions about light curtains, safety sensors, and guarding well before work begins. 

4D Systems will help you map out these features, as well as the spacing between robots, to the workspace you have available

You’ll have a clear idea of how your robots interact with their environment and with the people around them, minimizing the risk of safety incidents and ensuring compliance with standards.

Rationalizing Energy Costs Through Automation 

Robot-based automated manufacturing can actually be more energy-efficient than conventional processes. 

Manual, labor-intensive production lines use up a considerable amount of energy at every step.

 4D Systems implements next-generation automation systems with power requirements that are as little as 50 percent of the process they’re meant to replace. 

Significant energy use reductions could save you thousands of dollars each month,  another way that we help you reach a positive ROI faster. Energy savings from automated processes can also go a long way towards helping you meet state or nationally mandated standards for green and sustainable manufacturing. 

The Right Robots for the Right Job 

Automation robots are built with a wide range of specs and capabilities. Picking the right bots for the right job can have an impact on the overall productivity, as well as minimizing the transition time. At 4D Systems, we have access to bots from major brands including FANUC, Yaskawa Motoman, ABB, Kuka, and Kawasaki. 

We’ll assess your existing process flow to understand what type of robot works best at every step – for instance, a Cartesian gantry bot could be the best fit for your warehousing stage.  If you already use hardware from one of the major makers, we will help you incorporate a compatible robot solution to minimize turnaround time. 

The 4D Systems Difference: How We Empower a 24-month Turnaround Time For Robot ROI 

While most automated systems do eventually yield a positive ROI over manual production lines, it can take years to hit the break-even point. At 4D Systems, we work with you to build a highly optimized automation strategy that will tangible gains to your bottom line in 24 months or less. Let’s take a look at some of the ways 4D Systems empowers a faster ROI for your automation needs:

• Risk assessment – we’ll provide you with a detailed assessment from a safety and compliance perspective to understand whether automation is the best fit, as well as actionable insights to mitigate issues well before the implementation stage
• Upfront Simulation to prove out the use case: this’ll demonstrate tangible benefits within the parameters of your process, allowing us to iterate and improve on your automation strategy before actually deploying the bots 
• Virtual commissioning: we use Siemens PLC and Dassault DELMIA to create digital twins of each bot in your specific implementation. This’ll empower us to plan out everything from floor space to safety concerns to minimize the actual implementation time. 
• Strategically planning out floor space will help us maximize process and energy efficiency. This can potentially reduce monthly operating costs while boosting output. 

Conclusion 

With rising labor costs and a shrinking workforce pool of skilled talent, automated manufacturing systems aren’t optional anymore. 

You do have a choice, however, when it comes to your implementation partner. By leveraging strategic planning and proving out and optimizing your implementation in virtual space, 4D Systems can help you mitigate downtime, boost floorspace efficiency, and guarantee high levels of user safety. Our approach can cut your “time to ROI,” from several years to under 24 months. Reach out today at (800) 380-9165: let’s schedule a consultation call.

The post How 4D Systems Helps Manufacturers Achieve Automation ROI in Under 2 Years appeared first on 4D Systems.

This is where the team at 4D Systems comes into the picture. As a mechanical design service company, we have the expertise, experience, and the highly skilled engineers to design, develop, build, test, and evaluate a system, process, or equipment. We can also design specific robotic work cells to automate current processes and systems with the focus on increasing productivity and efficiency.

Consider Experience

When hiring any mechanical design service company, experience, and expertise is a critical consideration. We are a certified integrator for Kawasaki, ABB, Siemens, Dassault, and FANUC. We have designed, developed, and deployed robotic systems for industries as diverse as oil and gas and the automotive industry.

4D Systems offers over 70 engineers working on projects throughout North America. Our team specializes in turn-key solutions for small to large businesses and in the development of customized solutions that are innovative and state-of-the-art.

Solutions to Innovate

Businesses using a mechanical design service company need something innovative and cutting edge. Our goal is to support our customers not only in their current need for controls, robotics, and simulations, but also in their future needs. Having the ability to look towards the future allows our engineers to design for long-term business plans, saving your company time and costs over the long term.

To find out more, call on the team at 4D Systems today at 800-380-9165

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As a turnkey solutions provider, we focus on assisting our customers in maximizing productivity, increasing efficiency, and decreasing the cost of processing and operations through automation. Each of our customers is unique, not only in their needs for automation and robotics but also in their short and long-term business goals.

Customer Focused Design and Development

Using us as your turnkey solutions provider means the system we design and develop is ready to deploy and use immediately within your business. Our team of engineers and technicians ensures the systems we build, including simulations, controls, and robotic work cells are designed to work with your existing infrastructure.

Fully tested at our facility, these automation and control systems are unique to your process and your current and future production and efficiency requirements. Our teams install these systems in your plant or facility and ensure they meet and exceed your expectations.

Being a turnkey solutions provider means listening closely to our customers and creating innovative solutions to the challenges they are experiencing. Through the use of automation and robotics, industries from oil and gas through to automotive production increase productivity, decrease production costs, and find ways to become competitive in our increasingly global economy.

To find out more about 4D Systems solutions, call us at 800-380-9165.

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Digital twin technology is an emerging innovation that’s helping manufacturers to iterate and improve on their products at every stage of the product life cycle, from ideation and design to long-term maintenance. What are digital twins? They’re physically accurate digital representations of your physical products. IoT devices attached to a real product in physical space collect data across parameters to build a digital twin that performs and reacts to forces in exactly the same way as its real-life counterpart.

At 4D Systems, we offer Siemens and Dassault Systemes digital twin products. Both of these best-of-breed digital twin solutions can help you develop, build, iterate, and maintain products faster, cheaper, and more intelligently. In this article, we’ll be looking at some of the key opportunities Dassault and Siemens digital twin solutions have to offer.

Faster, Cheaper, Smarter: Optimizing Your Product Lifecycle Pipeline

Digital twins help optimize every stage of the product lifecycle, allowing you to build out new products faster and cheaper than before. The benefits of our Siemens and Dassault digital twin solutions start from the ideation and prototyping phase.

Physical prototypes are expensive to manufacture and replace, take time to make, and can’t always be subject to a full range of testing. Physical prototyping constrains the design team by making it harder to fail fast: building testing, and iterating on a failed prototype can take weeks or months, stretching development cycles, and adding to costs.

Digital twins can transform both product and process design. First, leverage a solution to build a physically accurate digital twin of your product. Then, you can test out product iterations in digital space to identify tolerances, weak points, and design flaws.

Solutions like Tecnomatix Process Simulate can help you do the same thing for specific parts of your manufacturing process. You can import models, specify parameters in your production process, validate robot actions, and more.

Digital twins enable a rapid iteration loop, with testing, development, and improvement taking place in a matter of days. Physical prototyping still has its place: key milestone builds can be physically prototyped. But digital twins allow the design team to assess the impact of tweaking minor parameters, paving the way to optimal product design.

Fewer physical prototypes and a faster turnaround time can potentially save thousands of man-hours, in terms of time and development costs. These costs can be passed onto clients, allowing you to deliver better solutions with quicker turnaround, for cheaper.

Beyond the Point of Sale: Exceeding Expectations with Predictive Maintenance

Great products don’t just deliver at the point of sale. When clients invest in your products, reliability and long-term value are key priorities. Aftersales maintenance forces clients to make a tough decision: either operate a product until component failure — which can increase downtime — or replace parts early, increase costs.

Manufacturers typically rely on the preventive maintenance paradigm to mitigate risk and manage maintenance costs. Preventive maintenance relies on the useful life estimate, a metric that describes the average lifespan of a particular component, the point at which the component has a roughly 50 percent chance of failure. The issue with preventive maintenance is that, statistically, there’s a high likelihood that any given component could last slightly longer or slightly shorter than the useful life estimate. More granular data, including data about the product’s operating environment, could help get a more accurate picture about their specific maintenance needs. This is where predictive maintenance solutions like Dassault 3DExperience comes into the picture.

According to a Deloitte study, the predictive maintenance paradigm can extend an asset’s lifetime by 20 percent and reduce costs by upwards of 12 percent. These long-term benefits extend across the entire life of a product, increasing its value manifold.

What exactly is predictive maintenance, though? Predictive maintenance involves using digital twin technology to identify long-term stressors and weak points in your products, across a range of operating environments and parameters. By modeling the effects of different stressors on digitally twinned components, you can fine-tune estimates for component life span. This can help customers optimize their maintenance cycles, saving down-time, and costs.

Modeling Expectations: Adding Value to Your Sales Strategy

Enterprise sales cycles are long and clients require proofs-of-concept and capability demonstrations. Physical PoCs and capabilities demonstrations can be expensive and high risk, especially in earlier stages of the sales cycle. How can manufacturers demonstrate product excellence while managing development costs?

Digital twin solutions offer manufacturers the opportunity to develop virtual PoCs and showcase product functions and capabilities to clients right at the first or second meeting. Digital twins can be built to spec, perfectly aligned with client requirements. Once the sales conversation has started in earnest, they can be used as a blueprint to build real, physical PoCs and prototypes. By taking complexity and cost out of the equation, digital twin technology allows sales teams to spread their wings, reach a wider client base, and get more projects in the pipeline.

Conclusion

As leaders in the PLM space, 4D Systems helps clients optimize every stage of the product lifecycle. Our digital twin solutions help cut costs, increase flexibility, and enhance R&D capabilities. In a rapidly changing manufacturing environment, 4D Systems’ digital twin products can help you stay a step ahead, exceed your goals, and align your approach with Industry 4.0 best practices.

Reach out to us at 800-380-9165 to chat about driving transformation at your manufacturing facility.

If you’re looking to make the change, reach out to us here. Let’s schedule a strategy call.

The post Digital Twin Solutions: Driving Manufacturing Success in Industry 4.0 appeared first on 4D Systems.

Today, the 4th industrial revolution and the promise of cross-industry automation aren’t a question of when or if. They’re happening right now and they’re radically transforming the nature and meaning of work. In today’s post-COVID world, automation has an impact on every imaginable sector. In this article, we’re going to take a look at just some of the ways in which businesses are impacted, and how they can strategically leverage automation solutions to turn uncertainty into opportunity.

The Rise of Automation Management and Support

Last year, the automation market touched $170 billion worldwide. With the rise of social distancing, as workforces across sectors are forced to operate remotely, the automation market grew at a staggering 18.4 percent. This is growth that’s attributed both to new businesses leveraging automation for the first time and mature clients expanding the role of automation in their key processes. In both these cases, clients are leveraging automation in a range of new ways and rapidly scaling up. This, unsurprisingly, can cause things to break.

One of the biggest stories this year is the rise of automation support and automation solution resellers and vendors. These solutions aren’t just technically complex: they require careful strategy and implementation to augment manual capabilities and functions. For first-time users, this often means working with an integrator like 4D Systems. By sitting down with a seasoned automation provider, new businesses understand how to fit an automation strategy into their existing process flow to speed things up and guarantee continuity with a remote workforce.

Experienced clients tend to have different support needs. When scaling existing automation solutions or expanding to new processes, things might not go as planned. When working with managed solution providers, clients have on-tap access to expertise, minimizing downtime and ensuring a rapid transition to a more highly automated process flow.

Human and Discrete Event Simulation

At the end of the day, your business processes and production work towards meeting the needs of (real) human clients in the real world. For manufacturers, this means that product testing has always been a critical part of the process. Your products need to be safe, perform to spec, and be comfortable and effective to use. In pre-COVID times, human testing was a viable approach. Product testers could test products for ergonomics, usability, and safety. Testers could also evaluate process chains to identify inefficiencies and areas of improvement. In the current environment, social distancing often means that businesses can no longer rely on manual human testing. In this context, automated solutions like Tecnomatix and DELMIA play a vital role. By simulating discrete process steps and human interactions, simulation solutions help manufacturers evaluate the effectiveness of their products and processes without a human presence. While certification and compliance in certain areas will likely require actual human interaction, simulation solutions are significantly reducing the need for on-site personnel during the development and iteration process. This means that manufacturers can maintain a high level of continuity, even if the bulk of their workforce remains remote.

Automation Consulting: Bringing New Businesses into the Fold

With new businesses across sectors looking to implement automation in their processes, the automation consulting industry is also set to record significant gains. Record growth this year in the automation space is driven in large part by these new players. In earlier times, the primary goal of businesses considering automation was to improve operational efficiencies. This implied a certain degree of flexibility: these were players trying to do something new, and eager to-engineer their processes, who’ve already put work in at the strategy level. Today, a large number of new clients look at automation from a continuity perspective. COVID and social distancing have essentially put them in a position where automation is the only way to guarantee business continuity. Often, they need guidance from the get-go, in terms of understanding what’s possible with automation, and integrating it into their overall strategy.

This situation means that automation consultants often play an outsized role in enabling change. They aren’t evangelists: they’re working with management from day one to build a solution that enables continuity with a remote workforce. Expert consultants ease the change, help mitigate teething pains, and build a strong foundation for future process flows once we’re out of the current crisis situation.

Conclusion: Building the Future Through Continuity

Today’s post-COVID business environment is a very different place compared to just a year ago. Every variable is uncertain. In this environment, continuity – being able to get things done – is the number one priority for businesses across sectors. In a world where social distancing and remote work are the norm, continuity, ironically, means systematic change. Continuity means re-engineering processes and embedding automation into key process flows. This is an immense challenge for any business. Seasoned automation consultants like 4D Systems can help you understand your automation requirements, build an actionable game plan, and deploy cost-effective automation solutions that get you back on your feet and operating at high efficiency.

If you’re looking to make the change, reach out to us here. Let’s schedule a strategy call.

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