For a long time, automation was considered a luxury reserved for bigger companies or something that only worked in special settings. Robotics experts say that is not the case anymore.
“If you haven't started your journey at all, you're behind,” Mark Longacre, senior strategist for market development at Formova, formerly known as JBT Automated Systems, said during a session at Automate on June 22. “But that’s okay. There’s [still] time to catch up.”
As technology has advanced, more companies have adopted fixed robots, multi-axis machines and automated vehicles that move objects from one place to another. Longacre, who has spent 27 years in mobile automation, has worked on some 500 projects helping companies transform their facilities to address labor challenges and remain competitive in the modern era of warehousing, logistics and manufacturing.
Longacre said companies looking to adopt automated guided vehicles or autonomous mobile robots, known as AGVs or AMRs, should first identify their problems, establish the goals they want to accomplish and take their time with implementation. Sometimes customers will be eager to implement robots without a clear plan, and those projects often go nowhere, he said.
“Poorly defined pilots or proof of concept, that is a really, really sluggish slope,” Longacre said.
Companies have a host of manual processes going on at once. Longacre said mapping out everything — from the people and equipment involved to the systems and workflows — is key to understanding which points to automate. From there, companies will have a detailed view of their pick-up and drop-off points, how many loads per hour they handle, when their peak hours are and more, he said.
“Doing this upfront homework, there’s just no replacement for it,” Longacre said. “Avoid automating a bad process. Sometimes it may not be a bad process, but it’s a process that’s really not defined well.”
Undocumented manual steps can interfere with automation. If there are a lot of “temporary storage areas,” where an employee places an object in the middle of an aisle and nobody knows what it is, or maybe it gets picked up later by the same person, “that’s scary to us,” Longacre said.
“There’s a certain amount of cleanliness that you see in a plant that has mobile automation, before you even see the vehicles, because you see more clear aisles,” he said. “You see less of that temporary workaround stuff that people do.”
Before going into the project phase, figure out the transition phase, Longacre recommended, including coordination with information technology teams and understanding which section of the facility to automate first. He also said figuring out where the intelligence should be located in the company’s systems and software is “super, super important” and “can make a great system kind of screech to a grinding halt” if done poorly.
Talent and training are also important for the transition. Once a project is live, a central team needs to own the automation system and there needs to be strong training to ensure people can maintain the vehicles or perform software updates when needed, Jordan Guhl, vice president of global sales and marketing at Formova, said during the session.
“A common misconception is that automation means zero people, or that it’s replacing people,” Guhl said. “Yes, inherently it does replace some labor. That is one of the cost drivers for choosing automation, but it doesn’t mean that we’re eliminating all people.”
An emerging trend and growing concern is dark warehouses, where the systems run autonomously with no human labor in the facility.
“I think we’re probably about five to six years away from that truly becoming a reality,” Guhl said.
