• Capacity;
• Productivity;
• Quality.

All of these reasons combined give a company an edge over the competition.  An edge that is hard to achieve with manual processes alone.

Capacity

Automation is generally undertaken to increase capacity. A well-designed system can produce more product per square foot than any of the manual alteratives. It also produces this product with little or no direct labor costs. Though no one wants capacity to sit idle, its much easier and cheaper to turn off an automated line, than a line staffed by people, unless those people can be used elsewhere for productive work.

Many companies turn to automation when their demand increases sharply. Replicating a manual line works for some increases, but mulitiple replications can be difficult to handle from a staffing and maintenance. Extreme replication also leads to confusing product flows, hampering efforts to create a world-class clean factory.

Productivity

Automation is the ultimate productivity boost. Nowhere else can one reduce direct labor so dramatically. With new flexible assembly technologies, this productivity boost can also be done without locking the production process into a rigid format. Many newer automation technologies can be reconfigured or redeployed. Lean automation can also be used to provide flexibility that was not achievable a few years ago.

Quality

Of all the indirect benefits of automation, increased quality is the most attractive. Automation directly improves quality by increasing the consistency of most processes.  This results in reduced scrap, which is always a good thing. Reduced scrap also typically correlates to better field performance, because the scrap reduction generally results from improved process control and better process repeatability. More products are produced "on the centerline" with less variance, and fewer marginal processes.  This translates into a better overall product that fails less frequently.

However, automation is also a harsh quality taskmaster.  Most automation systems, even the most adaptable and robust, are intolerant of significant variance in the incoming raw materials stream. Using automation forces the quality of the product upwards, in a general sense, because of this intolerance.

Automation also indirectly improves quality by providing a stable process, which creates a springboard for additional quality improvements. Without a stable process, many improvements are difficult to achieve.  The target moves to quickly to hit. However, introducing automation always introduces stability. By putting the simpler processes under tight control, and generally improving the repeatability of the overall process, one can more easily identify true process problems, assess the root cause, and institute a process improvement program.  Without stability, this is generally not possible.

Automation Benefits Summary

• Reduced Labor Costs
• Reduced Field Failures
• Improved Productivity
• Consistent Reliable Processes
• Reduced Scrap
• Increased capacity without increased labor.