STAYING POWER

Most shops find that manually loaded machine tools are functional about 65 percent of the available time. On the other hand, users of automated machine tools can expect their machines to function more than 85 percent of the available time. As real as these numbers are, many shop owners contemplating the move to robotics often find them hard to comprehend.

Mr. Burg points out that managers of shops with four or five CNC machine tools can almost always accurately estimate the number of spindles running at any given time. However, that same task becomes daunting in a shop with 35 or 40 machine tools. In fact, he notes that while his team commonly finds one out of every two spindles down in shops this size, owner/operators doubt the numbers—until they walk the floor, often finding no more than one-third of all their machines making parts on a consistent basis.

“We tell owners, ‘You can put this process in control and automate it. Conservatively speaking, we’re going to give you one free spindle for every four on your shop floor.’ We feel comfortable saying this because with a good robot interface, it’s not at all uncommon for us to easily bring a shop up to 95 percent utilization,” Mr. Burg says.

In fact, today’s extremely reliable machine tools and off-the-shelf components have brought both the cost and availability of automated CNC machining within the reach of shops that only a decade ago might never have considered themselves viable candidates for automation. As recently as the mid-1980s, many early attempts to automate failed due to a combination of high development and installation costs.
Misapplication of robotics, marginally functional equipment, and unsuitable applications for robotics marked other early, but failed, attempts at automation. Simple errors like omitting gaging in automation systems doomed other early systems to fail. A combination of less-than-reliable tools and inconsistent parts with critical dimensions also meant failure.