29 www.drivesncontrols.com January 2024 ROBOTS n that already underpins our UR+ partner ecosystem, streamlining innovation and reducing time-to-market. I can’t wait to see this evolve in the coming year. Companies will fuse IT and OT using data to improve operations The future of manufacturing is intricately linked to IT/OT integration as data will underpin innovation and eciency. Research shows that the manufacturing sector has been at the forefront of adopting cloud-based software services and we are already seeing some customers use these to enhance quality, cost eciency, and predictability. I am condent that 2024 will see the growth of data-driven logistics and manufacturing systems. Many people still have an outdated view of the cloud as merely being a data collector and backup function. But its real potential and power doesn’t lie in storing data or even linking machines. The real transformative leap comes when cloud-based software services connect humans and machines and thus help manufacturers to simplify complex processes and make smarter decisions. The benets of this digital evolution are signicant. Remote access to manufacturing data enables quick responses to issues and continuous improvement of automation. With dynamic systems now essential, trusted cloud technologies oer the latest in security and state-of-the-art services. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) companies highlight this progression, promising improved eciency and reduced downtime through OEE (overall equipment eectiveness), visualisation and predictive maintenance. As we move into 2024, manufacturers stand to gain from these advances, achieving higher quality, reduced downtime, better predictability and cost optimisation. This transition is a necessity, supporting the shift towards high-volume, high-mix production, resilient supply chains, competitive data utilisation, and sustainability. Logistics will become a major focus area for robotics Earlier this year, Interact Analysis looked at growth areas for robot shipments across various industries. The stand-out growth area? Logistics, where IA put the projected CAGR for cobot shipments at 46% for 2023-2027. Like manufacturing, many logistics companies face serious labour shortages while pressure is increasing as a result of globalisation, e-commerce and complex multichannel supply chains. More logistics, warehouse and distribution centres will turn to automation next year to provide services faster and with greater accuracy. To take an example – one logistics company we worked with revolutionised its fullment centre using collaborative robots, resulting in a 500% surge in eciency and order accuracy (see below). Robots – and the smart use of data – are poised to revolutionise logistics businesses across the value chain, from incoming packages to outbound logistics. The pace of development is robotics remains impressive. I look forward with great anticipation to another exciting year of progress during 2024. n Logistics cobots deliver 500% productivity boost The US logistics company DCL has its headquarters in Silicon Valley. In recent years, the direct-toconsumer (DTC) business of DCL’s customers has grown rapidly – around 20% year-on-year for the past ve years. As hourly labour costs rise, they need to be oset elsewhere, and seasonal demand surges bring additional challenges. Nearly half of DCL’s clients see end-of-year spikes, with up to 40% of their sales being in the last two months of the year. As a result, DCL has moved from handling a few thousand DTC orders a day, to more than 20,000. This presented a challenge: how could the company increase productivity without sacri cing quality or raising customer costs? It looked for a way of achieving this that would be exible, without needing a large capital investment. It wanted a technology that would integrate with its existing systems – not the other way around. DCL identi ed cobots (collaborative robots) as being a viable way of achieving its goals. It looked at existing robotic picking and ful lment systems, but none of them tted its need for a exible system that could be customised to meet clients’ needs. “They were either too expensive, the ROI wasn’t there, or the application didn’t work for the customers that we service, and it didn’t have the exibility that we were looking for,” recalls DCL Logistics’ president, Dave Tu. “So we thought: ‘Hey, why don’t we try to build it ourselves?’” DCL’s automation team opted for a cobot that picks products from two cells – one in front and one behind. A conveyor accumulates boxes, aligns them and moves them into a loading position. The robot – a Universal Robots’ UR10 model with a reach of more than 1.3m – then picks up a product every six seconds, brings it to a scanner, and places it into the box. If the item is incorrect, the cobot places it into a reject bin and continues to pick the next item, without pausing. The application is designed to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without any human interaction. Previously, ve people were needed to manage DCL’s manual picking process: one in the warehouse to pick up the order, another to bring it to the line, a third to verify it, a fourth to kit it, and a fth to pack and ship it. “The robotic system can do within two hours what a team of ve people would do in an entire day,” reports DCL’s chief revenue ocer, Brian Tu. “The robotic systems actually save us more than 50% in labour costs.” When a robot replaces a task previously done by a worker, that person can be reallocated to other services or trained to manage and maintain the robot. The automated line has also been a boon for the sta. “Normally, we accumulate orders through the night,” explains DCL Logistics automation engineer, Isaac Toscano. “When people come in in the morning to start their machines, they see that they have a variety and massive amount of orders. “They are always urging us to turn on the robot and have it ready, because it takes a big load o their backs.”This is especially true during seasonal surges, such as Black Friday. On one day, the robot picked up to 4,400 orders with a small crew to replenish parts. The savings are bene tting DCL’s customers as well. “The robotic system that we’ve implemented allows us to oer ful lment at lower pricing because we’re cutting out a lot of labour, enabling us to pass these cost savings on to our customers,” Brian Tu explains. “What we’ve seen is up to a 500% increase in productivity by using the robot. The ROI on the robots so far has been three months.”Tu expects the ROI to become even shorter as the company integrates more robots, which are also achieving a 99.99% order accuracy. While e-commerce is currently only about 15% of the retail market, it is expanding rapidly. “Over the next ve to ten years, robotics is going to be even more important part of the DCL operation,” says Tu. “As we integrate more systems, we’re going to go from one robot system to multiple robot systems, and the vision right now is to have as many as 10 to 20 robots.” By turning to cobots, DCL Logistics has boosted its productivity by 500% and achieved an ROI of three months
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