Page 38 - Packaging News Magazine July-Aug 2020

38 SMART FACTORY | www.packagingnews.com.au | July-August 2020 The key to automation success
For a successful automation project, a manager must pay close attention to the “three Ps”: product, process, and people, writes ADDE managing director Barry Hendy, who has been designing and building robotic and special-purpose machinery for Australian industry for more than 30 years.
OVER the years, I have seen many projects make the transition from wild concept to productive and effective reality. I have learned a lot about what is behind the successful and the dif- ficult projects.
It is easy to do simple automation that should work most of the time, but life rarely travels down the middle of the road. Great and successful automation projects must take full account and
manage all the things that can go wrong so they can keep going when the road gets a little rough at the edges. Ninety-nine per cent is not good enough – that might mean a stop every five minutes. To get rock- solid automation you must take account of all the exceptions – all the things that might go wrong – because if it can go wrong, it will.
PRODUCT
The first step when thinking about automation is to know your product intimately, totally. While some customer operations are single product, most manufacturers have a range of products they make in different batch sizes and rates. Knowing and document- ing the full scope of products is the most important section in the
requirements document. It is probably the fastest and the biggest that will determine the design solution, but you should also weigh that up with the percentage of your production that is spent on each product. If there is one very big or heavy product but it is only run occasionally, is it worth including in the must-have list?
Just as important as the range, and for single-product operations, you must also have a deep understanding of the variation in each product. It might be seasonal, it might be temperature, it might just be tolerancing – every product has variances. One project we did was packing croissants, but if they were left in the proofing room too long, they fluffed even more and didn’t even fit in the box. That there is variation in the amount a bread loaf rises is perhaps obvi- ous, but the variance in a bottle, carton or casting might be more subtle. Cardboard packaging dimensions typically vary by about 3 per cent, so how well a product fits in the package can change from batch of packing supplies to batch.
And then there is all the ways that the product can fail – or be a bit less than perfect. What are the checks that your operators might make, possibly even subconsciously, on every part? Do they know the sound or feel of how a part clips on and realise when they occa- sionally aren’t right? All these things can be managed, but only if they are known. If you miss them or don’t understand them you run the risk of shipping bad product or having to add additional quality checks to a finished machine.
PROCESS
Just like you must know your product intimately, you also must know your processes just as well. What are all the steps you need to execute your production? Most will be obvious, but it is the subtle or occasional task that are probably just as important to quality and reliability.
What can go wrong? What doesn’t always work perfectly? What are the checks you need, the alternatives and the subtleties of all the products? Dig deeper for the subtleties because they are the things you might not notice, or perhaps don’t always need to be done, but can have a big impact on the finished product.
Some level of failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is probably a good idea, but at least have a discussion with your operators on all the small things they see and do to make sure you understand what is needed to ensure everything goes well. Part of this will be con- sideration of if it is acceptable to just control the process, or if you need to check the result – somehow. Also consider that often auto- mating a process will make it inherently more reliable since you have removed the variations natural in human tasks and brought consistency to the process, and that alone may address an issue.
As your automation system is being designed a deep understand- ing of your processes will be critical to ensure all the checks, fault capture and failure management is in place.
Ninety-nine per cent is not good enough – that might mean a stop every five minutes.”