Lean manufacturing principles and automation systems can coexist, although many lean purists contend that lean goals conflict with using automation. Smart applications of automation, however, can result in deployment of systems that are both automated and lean, with flexible manufacturing systems that can be easily reconfigured as factory operations change.
Common misperceptions about lean manufacturing and automation systems lead many manufacturing managers to dismiss the use of automation in a lean setting.
Winthrop Sheldon of SLM Solutions spoke with Editor in Chief Brett Brune at the Aerodef 2017 conference in Texas.
Faurecia decided it needed to get serious about Industry 4.0 fast. To show the way, the French automotive supplier built a $64 million factory in Columbus, IN.
It’s no secret that Additive Manufacturing (AM), while often regarded as “emerging” technology, has secured its place in the manufacturing arena. There is good reason for this: AM offers a lure of solutions to previously impossible-to-solve design and manufacturing challenges.
There is a lot of noise around the issue of robotics and manufacturing jobs, some of it appearing in national business magazines like Forbes and Fortune, and one of the ways to quiet the voices claiming that automation kills jobs is to review the last seven years and to point to real-life examples of robotics applications keeping companies competitive, Association for Advancing Automation (A3) President Jeff Burnstein said today here at the Automate conference.
David Küstner and Daniel Erdelmeier wrote their theses at Lufthansa Technik. Now, their firm, Synergeticon, provides digital assistance to factory workers—and its small but growing staff counts among its customers Lufthansa Technik and its partner Airbus, Küstner said in a group interview with British and American tech writers visiting ZAL (Zentrum für Angewandte Luftfahrtforschung) TechCenter for applied aviation research here yesterday.
Manufacturing companies are responsible for creating products to deliver to their customers. Of course, a production system needs to be in place to understand how much product needs to be made.
At Lyall, we’ve been manufacturing components in the natural gas distribution industry for over 45 years, and we’ve spent the past 16 of those years implementing lean manufacturing principles in everything we do.
You have heard it before, today’s manufactured products are becoming ever more complicated. As computers and microcontrollers get ever cheaper and more powerful they have become more enticing for product engineers to use and incorporate. This means the intellectual property in the embedded software has grown increasingly in value – possibly exponentially.
