Common Pitfalls: Obstacles to Success for Robot Machine Tending

In my last blog, I highlighted some of the best practices you can follow to help make your robotic machine tending initiatives a success. If you missed it, you can read it here: https://flexxbotics.com/blog/robot-machine-tending-best-practices/. 

Today, I’m going to briefly cover the most common pitfalls that can derail your projects.

Avoiding these can be just as important as following the best practices because issues like undefined goals, inadequate preparation, and lack of communication can quickly halt progress and reduce project effectiveness.

For a more in-depth overview and useful tools, I recommend you download our Complete Guide to Robotic Machine Tending Projects.

Common pitfalls include:

Undefined Business Goals: Neglecting to identify specific business objectives and target outcomes results in unrealistic expectations and often perceived project failure.

Inadequate Preparation: Insufficient planning and design considerations for robotic enablement leads to deployment issues and suboptimal performance.

Lack of Communication: Failing to keep relevant factory stakeholders informed and up-to-date leads to lack of buy-in, commitment, and support and can result in misalignment and substantial resistance.

Selecting Complexity: Attempting to automate inconsistent or overly complex operations complicates implementation unnecessarily and measurably reduces project success rates.

Skipping Safety: Overlooking safety assessments and mitigation measures exposes workers to risk and can lead to injury incidents, compliance issues, and corporate liability.

Creating Custom Systems: One-off system software is unsustainable over time, difficult to support, and cannot be readily extended to additional machines, robots, or equipment limiting factory agility.

Using Legacy IT Systems: Force-fitting various outdated IT systems requires extensive customization and complicates integration resulting in ineffective robotic machine tending operation if possible at all.

If you have a new robotic automation initiative coming up and would like a deeper dive into real-world applications, take a look at one of our customer success case studies such as Ruland Manufacturing or get in touch with us to today to discuss your requirements.