Best Practices: Steps to Success in Robot Machine Tending

With today’s labor uncertainty more and more companies are deciding that now is the time to adopt robotic machine tending. However, there are a lot of considerations to ensure your project will achieve the desired outcomes.

At Flexxbotics we believe that success starts with following best practices.

It all begins with setting clear business goals and conducting thorough project planning. Then, you’ll want an operating, maintenance, and support plan that’s aligned with your overall strategy.

That’s why I wanted to briefly highlight a few key best practices in today’s post. For a deeper dive and a full list you’ll want to download our Complete Guide to Robotic Machine Tending Projects.

The paper includes a number of practical tools, examples, and templates that can help you plan your automation projects such as the 80 Point Robot Machine Tending Checklist and ROI Justification Starter Template spreadsheet.

To get you going here are a few of the best practices included:

Defined Business Goals: You’ll want to begin by establishing clear business objectives and target outcomes to ensure your project’s financial viability and alignment with strategic priorities.

Thorough Planning: Develop a detailed project plan that outlines requirements, timelines, and milestones for your robotic machine tending implementation.

Involve Stakeholders: Engage the appropriate managers and factory personnel early including mechanical, automation, and production engineers, as well as, plant and production managers to ensure alignment, authorization, and buy-in.

Target Consistency: Start by focusing on automating operations that are uniform and predictable to simplify your initial machine tending project designs and setups so you can achieve quick wins.

Mitigate Risks: Make sure to conduct thorough risk assessments and implement appropriate safety measures to protect both workers and equipment.

Standardized Solutions: Select a modern, standardized digital solution – and avoid custom programmed “one-off” installations that won’t scale out – that will connect and communicate with the machinery and systems on your long term roadmap for supportability, extensibility and future scalability across factory operations.

Ongoing Support: Ensure that you have an ongoing support plan for long-term operating reliability, maintenance, and rapid issue resolution.

In addition to our complete machine tending guide paper, you can learn more about how these best practices are applied in real-world applications in one of our customer success case studies such as Ruland Manufacturing here, or get in touch with us to discuss your project requirements today.