Some industry experts are saying robotic welding will cover initial automation costs with improved quality.
ENGINEERING.com recently spoke with Justin Percio, general manager at Cleveland Automation for Lincoln Electric, about how robotic welding solutions are becoming more cost effective for smaller shops.
The video above and Q&A below document interview highlights.
Jim Anderton (JA): Historically, there’s been a yawning canyon between smaller manufacturers and industrial automation on the welding side.
Justin Percio (JP): Yes, we’ve actually seen that a lot over the last couple of years. Smaller shops and those with low mix and high volume are looking for ways to improve their efficiencies in similar ways to how the automotive industry has traditionally done this.
So at Cleveland Automation and Lincoln Electric, we’ve really focused on general industry and smaller shops that are new to automation. We have a couple of examples here at FABTECH where we’re looking at alternate technologies which allow a customer to recognize a part, recognize a joint profile and make welding easier.
Every robotic cell we sell, we offer three seats in our robotic training class. A customer can come in by noon on the first day and be programming and welding with a robot.
By the third day they’ll be doing advanced functionality, and by the fifth day they’ve got laser seam tracking and other things that really bring the next level of technology into smaller user’s hands.
JA: You’ve brought up an interesting point on the training side. I’ve heard this over and over again: A company might have eight employees total and say they can’t have three of them spending six months getting something up and productive.
JP: We actually work with a small company here in Illinois called Engelbrecht Grills. The company has five employees today and they make very high quality grills. They looked at it as an efficiency improvement and quality improvement more so than throughput.
They’ve been able to leverage their technology, train their people and have been successfully using one of our robotic cells for three years now. It goes to show that smaller shops can benefit just as much from automation as large automotive manufacturers.
JA: There’s an assumption that many small shops think it’s just too expensive. How should they think of cost versus productivity?
JP: That’s a really good point when you’re looking at manual or semi-automatic welding and moving to robotics. The return on investment can be huge.
We’re looking at parts that could take an hour to two hours to weld manually. With a robot, we can weld them in five to 10 minutes. Some of the cells we’re featuring here at the show are going for between $50-70,000 dollars and we’re launching a financing program at the FABTECH show this year.
For as little as $1,000 dollars a month you can invest in robotic technology. Most of the time we’re seeing a return on investments of less than six months.
JA: Where manual processes are involved, quality is always an issue as it’s heavily dependant on operator skill. There are circumstances where things can go wrong and when they do it’s a serious rework issue. Can you make a case for small scale automation from a quality perspective?
JP: We’ve seen a lot of customers coming in recently and looking at automation strictly from a quality standpoint because the cost tied to quality is so high today.
There are hard costs to scrapping the part, but even grinding out a weld and rewelding it is a significant contributor to that cost. Today, if your tooling is up to the task, you can make a quality part every single time you put it in front of a robot.
JA: Is there a knowledge or expertise gap that someone already semi-automatic or manually welding now may need to bridge?
JP: The only skill gap between going from semi-automatic to robotic is programming the robot. That’s when we fall back on our training position. We believe we can convert a skilled welder into a skilled robotic programming welder very easily. We can automate any welding process today.
For more information, visit www.lincolnelectric.com.