SpiTrex Orthopedics

The Problem

Increase closed-loop production throughput

SpiTrex Orthopedics needed to increase production throughput capacity while maintaining exacting part quality and FDA compliance. The company was constrained by the availability of highly skilled personnel and the deep process knowledge required for continuous operations.

The Solution

Flexxbotics for FDA compliant manufacturing

“Flexxbotics directly improves our throughput and Return On Capital (ROC) which in turn increases profitability,” states Brett Gopal, Senior Vice President of Operations at SpiTrex Orthopedics.

“Flexxbotics is the only software solution we found capable of delivering the precision, cycle-time, and closed-loop compliance required,” said Brett Gopal, Senior Vice President of Operations at SpiTrex Orthopedics.

Flexxbotics communicates directly with the FOBA laser marking system and robotic automation. The solution changes jobs in real-time and within sequence, enabling job change-over in less than 10 minutes, as opposed to requiring an hour or more of an engineer’s time to set-up the workcell when a new job is run.

“The autonomous changeover process coupled with the closed feedback loop functionality enable us to produce extremely high tolerance parts through continuous flow which reduces the overall lead time by 20%,” explains Brett Gopal, Senior Vice President of Operations at SpiTrex Orthopedics.

Flexxbotics also connects with the vision system verifying the laser marking on each part to autonomously sort based on the results ensuring closed-loop quality for higher yields.

“It was clear the benefit of Flexxbotics’ solution horizontally integrating from one FOBA machine to another. What made their solution extremely unique was their ability to vertically integrate to our pre-machining process, post processing, and IT systems,” explained Brett Gopal, Senior Vice President of Operations at SpiTrex Orthopedics.

Flexxbotics goes on to use COGNEX camera images to determine the pass/fail status of each part, and then sends alerts with the images to pre- and post-process workcells when nonconformance issues are detected that need correcting.

“We are impressed with Flexxbotics’ autonomous process control, and the ability to close-the-loop by alerting upstream and downstream workcells of quality problems based on automated inspection results which is quite unique,” noted Brett Gopal, Senior Vice President of Operations at SpiTrex Orthopedics.

“Rolling out Flexxbotics across all FOBA laser marking workcells results in a 10:1 machine-to-man ratio which enables continuous operation allowing us to ship more high quality parts even with labor shortage challenges making it a game-changer for our business,“ continues Brett Gopal, Senior Vice President of Operations at SpiTrex Orthopedics.

• Ability to autonomously configure the FOBA laser marker and robotic automation for each job that will run.
• Closed-loop in-process inspection with COGNEX vision systems which direct the robots to sort parts based on the FOBA marking results and conformance to critical characteristics.
• Open connectivity and interoperability between FOBA laser marking systems, vision systems, and advanced robotics along with existing IT business systems.
• Universal switching process to enable quick changeover for faster set-up times.
• Direct feed of workcell operations and inspection data into the quality repository.
• Solution flexibility to start with initial workcells, get success quickly, and scale to additional workcells factory-wide.