However, meeting this demand is difficult even for companies that are advanced in digital transformation and use robots to manufacture and assemble parts in siloed environments. There is an increasing need for customized products and packaging in almost every industry. Even for other industries, knowledge transfer and worker training for new hires are difficult and expensive, making this a growing reason for the need for automation. Some industries, such as oil and gas, have been notoriously suffering from labor shortages caused by both aging workplaces and the lack of fresh graduates in the field. Therefore, companies are interested in full automation with lights-out. While replacing some workers with robots can help save operational costs, the use of collaborative robots (cobots) requires further worker safety measures for the remaining workers. A safe workplace for factory workers has several advantages, but it comes at an increased cost, which large organizations are already trying to trim. Utilizing technologies to improve worker safety has proven to be a double-edged sword for factory workers. Rising worker safety concerns and associated costs The growing megatrend of reducing carbon emissions will further drive the requirement for automation.ĥ. Similarly, Canadian company Eigen Innovations claims to reduce material waste from industrial processes using its automated inspection system. For example, Siem Offshore has partnered with a predictive maintenance (PdM) vendor to reduce its carbon footprint caused by traveling crews for IMR. In addition to operational and maintenance costs, inefficiency and downtime caused by human workers and inflexible manufacturing systems also lead to increased material wastage and carbon footprint. Minimizing wastage for sustainability reasons Companies are keenly interested in automating these tasks and processes to reduce downtime.Ĥ. In addition to the unplanned downtime, the lack of flexible production systems and the need for manual inspection, maintenance, and repair (IMR) are reasons for planned downtime in manufacturing. These can lead to millions of dollars in lost revenue, depending on the nature of the production facility. Some estimate that around 23% of all unplanned downtime in manufacturing is caused by human errors. This higher throughput can make automated robots more efficient than human workers. Unlike human workers, a robustly built robotic system can run 24/7 without the need for breaks, vacations, and shift changes. Achieving higher efficiency using automation In addition, the push to increase minimum wages and benefits for factory workers is driving large corporates toward increased levels of automation.Ģ. While robots have high upfront costs, they can be less expensive than human labor over time. One of the motivations for automation is to reduce operational costs. Besides technical enablement, there are other factors responsible for the growing demand for lights-out, which we’ve listed below. Some of the ideas developed in the late 20th century are getting enabled by modern technologies like advanced robotics, computer vision, industrial IoT, machine learning algorithms, and improved computing (cloud and edge). Using the Lux Tech Signal graph, we can see that there is steadily increasing activity in lights-out manufacturing. In this blog, we discuss the types and significance of the drivers and barriers for lights-out. On the other hand, despite the driving forces, there are still barriers to adoption. It’s clear that lights-out isn’t a new concept, but it has been gaining strong momentum in the past few years for various reasons. Similarly, in the Netherlands, Philips has been running lights-out manufacturing plants to produce electric razors with a team of 128 robots and nine quality assurance (QA) workers. The robots can go unsupervised and without maintenance for as long as a month at a time. Looking at more successful cases, Fanuc has been running 22 lights-out factories since the early 2000s that use robots to manufacture CNC machines. Similarly, GE operated a light bulb factory in Virginia from the early 1990s, which produced more than 10,000 units per hour with only a few human workers assigned to perform maintenance of the machines before the factory was shut down in 2010. However, the project was shut down because of the fixed tooling, which made the plant inflexible to adapt to product variations. IBM built a lights-out plant in Texas in 1980 to assemble computer keyboards. In fact, several organizations have operated some form of lights-out factories throughout the past few decades Lights-out is a manufacturing methodology in which manufacturing is fully automated and requires no human presence so that the lights and even ventilation can be shut off. While the concept sounds futuristic, it has been circulating around for a couple of decades now.
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