Over the years, factories have sought ways to help improve their production process. Automation has been one of the most common way to do this.
Over the last five decades in manufacturing, robots have been a consistent presence in the factory. However, as times have changed, those large and intimidating robots have given way to smaller and nimbler collaborative robots also known as cobots.
As more and more factories in different industries have switched to cobots, we are learning every day of the benefits that factories are deriving from them.
They include:
Handling labor shortages
One of the major challenges in the manufacturing world is that they are not able to hire for numerous positions in the factory. In addition, hiring numerous workers is no longer sustainable as competition rises and profit margins go down.
To effectively handle this problem, factories go out and acquire a universal robot for their operations. Depending on the size of the operation and the number of tasks that you want to automate in your factory, you can get more than one robot.
Collaborative robots can carry out numerous tasks around the factory and you will have plugged your labor shortages.
Helps meet customer demand
As a manufacturer, you want to produce the best product you can to please your customers and make a substantial profit to keep your operation going.
When you produce a high-quality product, you are bound to attract numerous customers your way. This means that you have to enhance your production capacity to meet all the new demand or a competitor will take away your customers.
Collaborative robots are one of the methods you can implement to help meet this new demand. Cobots, are fast and will work for as long as you want even with no supervision. As a result, you will no longer be overwhelmed with orders as you can produce and deliver on time cost effectively.
Enables a factory to adapt to the changing customer preferences
In this current age, trends move fast. As such, producers need to be fast and flexible to take advantage of the changes in customer tastes, preferences and requirements.
Collaborative robots in the factory can assist a factory in adapting as fast as customer requirements and producing products that satisfy these new needs.
Cobots only require new instructions on how to produce the next in thing. With that done, sit back and get ready to take the market by storm as you introduce products that your customers want and need.
Enhance employee morale
One of the ways to enhance employee morale is by taking away ergonomically unfavorable tasks. These are tasks that will require large exertions of energy and physical strength that may end up causing personal injury and absenteeism from work.
Another aspect of work that reduces employee morale, is safety at the work place. When the workplace is prone to accidents, workers do not look forward to going to work. Boring and monotonous work is another morale sucker at the factory.
However, all this can change in an instance by introducing collaborative robots in your production process. First, the robots will be assigned or the dangerous and boring tasks. This will therefore allow reassignment to tasks that are best suited to people that involve creativity and communication that a robot cannot effectively handle.
These reassignments enhance the morale of your employees and help the company enhance its production capacity and financial position.
Cobots can collaborate with other cobots
One of the results of reassigning tasks in the factory is that you can leave your robots to work together. Known as collaborative robots, they collaborate with both human workers and other robots.
You can have your robots working together to complete a particular procedure to enhance speed and accuracy within the production process.
Conclusion
Collaborative robots have gained a large acceptance over the years they have been in existence. All over the world, manufacturing companies large and small are enjoying the advantages of cobots from Universal Robots.
