Automation Propels U.S.

Manufacturing
Forward
Step into any major manufacturing facility in the United States today and it is clear to see that
the future of advanced manufacturing is already here. Innovative technology at work is
evident in tools such as robotic arms, programmable logic controllers, and CNC machines
that
are
helping
to
produce
everything
from
cars
to
computers.
Such automation is taking root and changing the face of manufacturing among companies
both large and small. Case in point is Baltimore-based Marlin Steel Wire. A decade ago,
employees were bending wire by hand to make steel baskets. Owner Drew Greenblatt saw
demand plummet as the companys primary clientele, bagel shops, shifted their orders to
cheaper Chinese manufacturers. He made the decision to transform his business and invest
in automation to build baskets for many different industries, says Bob Doyle, a
spokesperson
for
the
Association
for
Advancing
Automation.
Today, Marlin Steel Wire makes baskets for the automotive, aerospace, and pharmaceutical
industries. Those clients have significantly higher design specifications compared to the bagel
shop owners, notes Doyle. The only way [Marlin Steel Wire] could do that was to invest in
automation, both in robotics and other types of manufacturing technologies, says Doyle.
Marlin Steel Wire has since grown from 15 to almost 30 employees. The higher-skilled jobs
also pay higher wages and benefits. That is just one example of a small company that has
really seen the benefits of investing in robotics and automation, he adds.

Manufacturers across the board are increasingly turning to automation as a means to improve
quality, productivity, safety, speed, and competitiveness, and to reduce costs. The shift has
been a boon to the robotics industry. In fact, 2012 set a new record for the North American

robotics industry, and sales/orders for the first half of 2013 have continued to push the bar
higher. The Robotic Industries Association estimates that some 230,000 robots are now in use
in U.S. factories, placing the United States second only to Japan in robot use.
The potential for continued growth is significant as advanced manufacturing processes
continue to gain a foothold. Some industry sources estimate that only about 10 percent of
U.S. companies that could benefit from robots have so far installed them. In particular, the
300,000-plus small to medium-sized U.S. manufacturing companies represent significant
growth opportunities as more of those firms embrace automation, notes Doyle. Factors that
will continue to fuel that growth include reduced costs for robotics systems, as well as an
explosion of new technologies in the robotics field that have made user interfaces simpler,
improved gripper technology, and created better vision-guided systems that have opened up
new manufacturing opportunities for the use of robots.

Making the future

How robots and people team up to manufacture things in new
ways
Apr 21st 2012 | from the print edition

BACK IN THE 1980s, when America's carmakers feared they might be overwhelmed by
Japanese competitors, many in Detroit had a vision of beating their rivals with lights-out
manufacturing. The idea was that factories would become so highly automated that the lights
could be turned off and the robots left to build cars on their own. It never happened. Japan's
advantage, it turned out, lay not in automation but in lean-production techniques, which are
mostly people-based.

Many of the new production methods in this next revolution will require fewer people
working on the factory floor. Thanks to smarter and more dexterous robots, some lights-out
manufacturing is now possible. FANUC, a big Japanese producer of industrial robots, has
automated some of its production lines to the point where they can run unsupervised for
several weeks. Many other factories use processes such as laser cutting and injection
moulding that operate without any human intervention. And additive manufacturing machines
can be left alone to print day and night.
Yet manufacturing will still need people, if not so many in the factory itself. All these
automated machines require someone to service them and tell them what to do. Some
machine operators will become machine minders, which often calls for a broader range of
skills. And certain tasks, such as assembling components, remain too fiddly for robots to do
well, which is why assembly is often subcontracted to low-wage countries.
Industrial robots are getting better at assembly, but they are expensive and need human
experts to set them up (who can cost more than the robot). They have a long way to go before
they can replace people in many areas of manufacturing. Investing in robots can be
worthwhile for mass manufacturers like carmakers, who remain the biggest users of such
machines, but even in highly automated car factories people still do most of the final
assembly. And for small and medium-sized businesses robots are generally too costly and too
inflexible.
But the next generation of robots will be different. Not only will they be cheaper and easier to
set up, they will work with people rather than replacing them. They will fetch and carry parts,
hold things, pick up tools, sort items, clean up and make themselves useful in myriad other
ways.
Various efforts are under way to produce such robots, especially for smaller companies.
Germany's Fraunhofer Institute, for instance, is involved in a European initiative to develop
robots that are safe enough to operate alongside workers (at present, most industrial robots
still have to be caged in case they accidentally hit someone) and capable of understanding
simple instructions, including voice commands.
The present generation of factory robots is akin to early mainframe computers in offices,
reckons Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot, an American firm whose products include
the Roomba, a robotic vacuum-cleaner, as well as military robots. Those big computers were
run by experts, a long way away from most users, until personal computers arrived. But the
PC didn't get rid of office workers, it changed the tasks they did, says Mr Brooks. Often that
meant doing more sophisticated work. In 2008 he founded Heartland Robotics to produce a
range of machines that would serve as the equivalent of the PC in robotics.
Mr Brooks's lips are sealed about what these machines will be like, although his views about
the future of robotics provides a clue. As Toyota discovered with lean manufacturing,

production-line workers, given the chance, can come up with plenty of good ideas to improve
productivity. If people on the factory floor or in workshops are provided with easy-to-use
robots they can become more productive, says Mr Brooks. Bring together these new robots
with innovative manufacturing technologies, and you could get a manufacturing renaissance.
Millions of small and medium-sized firms will benefit from new materials, cheaper robots,
smarter software, an abundance of online services and 3D printers
That would make things easier for start-ups, but scaling up is notoriously difficult because the
capital costs of equipping a factory are often too high for investors to stomach, or the
payback period is too long. In some businesses advanced production technologies could bring
down those costs, reckons Martin Schmidt, an electrical-engineering expert at MIT. Mr
Schmidt has started a number of companies that make tiny devices such as miniature sensors.
He thinks that the production equipment for such devices might be shrunk too, even to
tabletop size, cutting capital costs. In industries where that happens, says Mr Schmidt, I
think we will see some disruption.
Mass-produced goods will continue to be made in factories using traditional subtractive
methods for a long time yet, although with increasing automation and flexibility, as practised
by the mass-market carmakers. There will also be some super-high-tech factories, like those
of GE and Rolls-Royce, that make smaller quantities of highly specialised products such as
jet engines. There will be millions of small and medium-sized firms that will benefit from
new materials, cheaper robots, smarter software, an abundance of online services and 3D
printers that can economically produce things in small numbers. And there will be countless
entrepreneurs in little workshops, homes and, no doubt, garages who will be able to do things
they could never have done before.
Getting there
Manufacturing revolutions never happen overnight, but this one is already well under way.
There is enough transformative research going on in the biological sciences and in
nanotechnology to spawn entirely new industries, like making batteries from viruses. And if
the use of carbon-fibre composites were to spread from sports cars to more workaday models,
the huge steel-stamping presses and robot welding lines would vanish from car factories.
Additive manufacturing, like anything else digital, is already becoming both cheaper and
more effective. The big breakthrough would be in workflow. At present 3D printers make
things one at a time or in small batches. But if they could work in a continuous processlike
the pill-making machine in the Novartis-MIT laboratorythey could be used on a moving
production line. The aim would be to build things faster and more flexibly rather than to
achieve economies of scale. Such a line could be used to build products that are too big to fit
into existing 3D printers and, because the machine is digitally controlled, a different item

could be built on each platform, making mass customisation possible. That would allow the
technology to take off.
Can it be done? Back to the EuroMold exhibition, where TNO, an independent research
group based in the Netherlands, showed a novel machine with 100 platforms travelling
around a carousel in a continuous loop. A variety of 3D-printing heads would deposit plastics,
metals or ceramics onto each platform as they pass to make complete products, layer by layer.
Scale up the idea, straighten out the carousel and you have a production line with multiple
printing heads.
The Hammering Man outside the Frankfurt Messe is still bashing away at his piece of
metal. But in a decade or two visitors to future industrial fairs may wonder what he is doing.
From the print edition: Special report

The Dangers of Process Automation

When attempting to improve process performance, automation is a tempting solution. While

automation can be very effective, other process problems should be addressed first in order
for an investment in automated systems to pay off.
Most of us need our processes, particularly our production processes to happen faster and at
less cost. A common go-to solution is to invest in automating manual processes.
Automation offers two-fold benefits. Automated processes are generally faster, and once
tuned in, they also boast better, more consistent, quality because they eliminate human error.
This is generally true.
Automated processes are much like computers, however. They do exactly what we tell them
to do or what they are programmed to do. They dont always do what is right. If we dont
error-proof the process before automating it, or at least while automating it, then automation,
instead of eliminating waste, tends to produce more waste faster. It is my experience that
automation succeeds best if it is the last improvement to a process. It disappoints when it is
the first.
A few years ago I helped to institute a standard, enterprise-wide, automation of Engineering
Change (EC) and document control processes as part of the institution of an Enterprise

Resource Planning (ERP) and Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) system. At that time
there were several design and manufacturing centres, each using its own EC system and rules.
In one centre in particular, two people worked full-time to manage the EC process. It had
many facets to it that required some intelligence. One in particular was that a large number of
people needed to be notified of engineering changes and each had the privilege of approving
each one to indicate that the change was reviewed.
You might imagine the waste that went with such behaviour. The EC process people had to
manually determine from the rule set who needed to approve each EC and e-mail it out. Then
the EC would wait in e-mail boxes for someone, sometimes someone who had much bigger
concerns than an EC, to get around to reviewing the EC and responding.
To keep ECs from being help up eternally, if no response was received within a week, the
process people would begin to make phone calls and leave voice messages. If after three
weeks there was no response, it would automatically be approved and would move on to the
rest of the process.
You can see, from just that one explanation of a minor portion of the process, why people
were dedicated to managing the process. Now lets imagine automating that process.
If the example were automated as is, how fast would a large number of people get their email boxes filled up with EC requests? Obviously, it would occur as fast as engineers could
produce them. Now consider that the process people did a quality screening function as well
and kicked back any incorrectly applied or incomplete EC requests back to the engineers
before executing the process.
An automated process might not include that function. So, not only is all of the overprocessing, overproduction, and waiting waste taking place, it is also producing all of the
defective ECs that are input into the system. Now, to correct the errors, all of that waste has
to also be repeated. Obviously, more waste for everyone to deal with, more often, is not what
we wanted from an automated process.
Instead, what we did is reduce the EC process to its most fundamental, essential elements. We
had to redefine some beliefs and alter some authority in order to reduce review and approval
to a single person per EC instead of many. We error-proofed the request system and
eliminated the options and decisions as much as possible. Yes, we gave up a great deal of
flexibility, but we also unloaded an enormous amount of waste.
Once the process was simplified and error-proofed as much as possible, we instituted the
automated system according to the simplified solution. Life was much better before everyone,
except perhaps the dedicated EC process people who were routed to alternative
responsibilities. In the end, after adjusting, I think life was even better for them. Their new
responsibilities were more meaningful (no one likes being a monitor of wasted time and
energy).

The same phenomenon occurs with automated production processes. We often justify
investing in automated equipment by calculating improvements in production time and
reduction of errors and defects. However, if a bad input is inserted into an automated system,
a bad output occurs faster, consuming materials and resources faster.
Bad inputs to automated processes can come from a wide variety of sources.

Poor materials.

Poor programming.

Incorrect assumptions or settings.

Poor process design.

Lack of control.

Too much adjustment or over-control.

Instability in the process or environment.

Poor timing.

Too many initiated.

Too few initiated.

Incorrect order initiated.

Above are a few common sources. Specific processes will have specific errors that can occur.
If the sources for error are not addressed prior to instituting automation, the errors will still
occur. They might occur more often because there is no longer an intelligent person in the
process to recognize when something is in error and call for a correction before the output is
complete.
If the first opportunity to recognize and correct an error is after the output is complete or
when the system fails because of the error, then the automated system will drive more
expense and defects and down-time instead of save it.
Before automating any process, break that process apart and work diligently to remove the
waste and errors from it. As I wrote above, an automated process does what it is told. Poor
inputs result in poor outputs. Make sure that the process you automate is a solid, error-proof,
consistent, and reliable process.
The misperception about automation is that automated processes are by nature error-proof
and faster. It is not so. Only a good, error-proof process that is automated in a reliable manner
will be faster with better quality.
Take this message away from this post. Automate a process only after you have applied the
other process improvement tools and methods to reduce opportunities for error, eliminate
waste, and improve consistency. It may be that such is done while developing or
programming the automated system, but it must be done first. Otherwise, the waste and error
occurring within or as an output will undermine the business plan that justified the
investment.

Revolutionising Sensor Based Automation in

Manufacturing
by R Harrison, F Jammes, H Smit and T Kirkham
Increased access to device-level automation components is closing the final gap in the
enterprise computing model.
The implementation of Web service-enabled sensors and actuators on production lines will
permanently change the way in which future automation systems are designed and
implemented. Current interfaces to automation components are largely vendor-specific,
restricting the reconfiguration of lines and the management of line data across enterprises.
Outside the automation domain, enterprise system development has seen real-time data
linkage take great steps in the office, warehouse and supply chain. Research into the use of
Web-service-enabled sensors and actuators has the potential to present an open standardsbased method to integrate production lines into this enterprise computing model, an
innovation that will revolutionize automation in future manufacturing plants and remove
control from vendors back to users.
Implementation
The SOCRADES and SODA (Service-Oriented Device and Delivery Architecture) projects
have conducted research and trials into automation based on service-oriented architecture
(SOA), and in the past year have delivered initial prototypes. At the recent ITEA exhibition in
Rotterdam, a test rig developed with Ford was used to demonstrate SOA-based sensor and
actuator data being used to manage monitoring and control applications. The data was fed to
project partners in the Enterprise computing field (SAP) and industrial automation sector
(ARC Informatique). The demonstrator illustrated how the production data could be
combined with other enterprise data to improve the accuracy of decisions relating to
production routing and supply chain management.

Figure 1: Vision of service-enabled automation.

During the demonstration, data from the sensors and actuators on the production line was
transmitted by equipment created by Schneider Electric. This equipment consisted of Webservice-enabled Field Terminal Blocks (FTBs), which support the Device Profile for Web
Services (DPWS) toolkit. The DPWS toolkit is designed for embedded systems and has a
small memory footprint, but also contains a selection of Web service standards to suit the
demands of an automation environment. Both projects are working on these demands, which
are focused on execution timing and reliable/efficient message delivery. The FTB is a piece
of hardware that contains an ARM 9 chip developed to support the DPWS toolkit.
The support of DPWS on the FTB allows Web service interfaces to be developed to the
device-level I/O within the line. For example, calls to directly command an actuator or
monitor specific sensors on lines can be made via Web services located on a variety of
applications, as opposed to specific vendor control devices. The control of devices by Web
services has been achieved using central Web service orchestration and also on a smallerscale peer-to-peer choreography.

Figure 2: ITEA exhibition architecture and rig picture showing FTB location.

Future
Device-level automation components that produce data in standard and open forms will be
faster to reconfigure, reducing costs by improving resource usage and reducing downtime.
The greater accuracy and real-time access to product-level data will further enhance
enterprises by allowing them to make more accurate decisions regarding production and
supply chain matters. The application of the results from these research projects in real
manufacturing environments will be the subject of future work that should confirm these
findings. The adoption of the approach will also be dependent on further research in the areas
of safety, security and real-time execution of devices.
Direct SOA linkage to sensors and actuators moves a traditionally vendor-specific computing
area into a new open domain, ready to link with existing innovations in enterprise computing.
For the manufacturer this will improve performance and reduce costs. However, this is
dependent on the continued development of devices such as the FTB, pioneered in the
SOCRADES and SODA projects to support this new vision.

How IoT big data will transform manufacturing automation

By Mary Shacklett September 28, 2014, 11:19 PM PST

Find out how big data and Internet of Things contribute to smart manufacturing automation, which
may benefit everyone in the supply chain.

Imagine a world where smart systems, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and robotics combine
to automate large areas of manufacturing, linking wired and wireless networks throughout the
world in the making of products, and relying on both structured and unstructured big data to
get the job done. McKinsey & Company describes smartmanufacturing as a "type of
information system--through sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects...[where]
processes govern themselves, where smart products take corrective action to avoid damages
and where individual parts are automatically replenished."

Realizing the potential of a total manufacturing transformation with use of IoT big
data, Germany initiated its Industry 4.0 government initiative to spur its industrial sector.
Dependent upon real-time big data for driving and making decisions in the factory, Industry
4.0 represents, according to pundits, the "fourth industrial revolution" -- following the steam
engine, the conveyer belt, and the first phase of IT automation. In this world, multiple
factories, logistics providers, etc., will interconnect with each other in a system of peopleoriginated and IoT big data automation -- all controlled by a central system "back plane" that
is capable of synchronizing and orchestrating all events throughout the supply chain and
giving everyone involved full visibility of what is going on.
To execute the smart manufacturing vision, enterprise systems must be modified so they can
interface with and monitor IoT sensor-based technology, along with a host of disparate
manufacturing, logistics, procurement, order, and other systems that must be integrated into a
single back plane system. From an IT perspective, the task can be daunting. From a vendor
management perspective, there can also be looming challenges, as some vendors will be more
prepared than others to participate in the effort.
Equally important will be the need to bring together the big data team with the standard data
team, because for Industry 4.0-style manufacturing to work, both big and standard data must
work together and be tightly integrated. This means getting both data teams engaged in a joint
project so information flows can be architected that draw upon both standard and big data to
drive the automation needed to run the factories. If factories are spread across different
suppliers and geographies, there will also be a need to import that big and standard data
architecture to others who are part of the manufacturing supply chain.
The good news is that industry standards are emerging for big and standard data interfaces
that will facilitate smart manufacturing information flows.
In industries like food and beverage, sensors that generate machine-driven information and
automatic alerts already are widely used to measure the temperature and the humidity of
containers that food products are shipped in, and also to track shipments from their points of
origin to their final shipping destinations.
"The presence of standards and regulatory compliance requirements is one of the major
drivers for the implementation of sensor systems," said V. Sankarnarayanan, a Frost &
Sullivan senior industry analyst in measurement and instrumentation. "Governments across
the globe have strict laws that mandate the use of sensors and other electronic devices that
sense the risk involved in food contamination."
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For big data, the move to smart manufacturing systems will be transformational. Big data will
be called upon to "run things," and not just to deliver analytics.
"Tasks that are currently still performed by a central master computer will be taken over by
components," said Peter Post, head of corporate research & program strategy at Festo. "These

will network with one another in an intelligent way, carry out their own configuration with
minimal effort and independently meet the varying requirements of production orders."
As big data and IoT remakes factories into optimized and highly automated plants, goods will
achieve greater speeds to market, with stepped up profits for companies since more goods can
be routed to market faster. Progressive companies are already investing in IoT-driven
systems, which they believe will enable faster responses to changes in consumer demand and
product innovation. This potentially opens up greater market opportunities for companies and
more options for consumers -- which benefits everyone in the value chain.