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3 tips for reshoring through automation
28 September 2023
LACROIX Electronics
To stand out from competitors, industrial manufacturers are increasingly bold and inventive in optimizing their manufacturing costs. Automation, in particular, represents a new and often underestimated lever of competitiveness. Discover the three tips to make your reshoring possible in the EMEA region.
Tip #1: Ensure that your product is eligible for automation
To automate certain manufacturing processes, it is essential to be able to amortize the cost of designing special machines. Ensure that the quantity of parts to be produced and the production duration are significant enough to make the required investments profitable.
📌 Key takeaway: During the pre-project phase, accurately assess the feasibility and expected gains from automating certain manufacturing processes.
To produce a large number of roller shutter remote controls in mass production, the solution was to automate certain processes. Through custom-developed special-purpose machine programming, automation has enabled:
- Increasing the production rate. ;
- Enhancing product reliability ;
- Reducing manual operation time by a factor of five.
Tip #2: Enhance your product design through integrated automation with Design for Manufacturing
Anticipating process automation upstream of the production phase is always preferable, ideally starting from the product design stage. Why? It’s essential to be able to make strategic design changes to automate processes optimally. This allows for tailoring the product’s design to manufacturing and assembly constraints.
Integrating automation criteria during the design phase allows for anticipation of increased production volume right from the development stage, making automation possible when transitioning to mass production. By automating, you optimize the efficiency of your production and benefit from enhanced quality and reliability while reducing your manufacturing lead times. ”
Among the innovations developed at the French assembly site of LACROIX, a third robotic arm has been introduced to assist operators. It helps alleviate the strain of handling heavy parts and facilitates the positioning of components during assembly operations. Other automated workstations have also been implemented to automate specific processes such as assembly, handling, screwing, gluing, and welding.
💡Did you know? Automation is not limited to robotics. In fact, only 50% of automation projects involve robotics. The addition of a camera to automate inspection is already a part of it, for instance.
Tip #3: Enhance your competitiveness through custom-tailored processes
Our ability to produce electronic cards from components of all sizes – with varying power levels and levels of complexity – is a strong point of our expertise. For every need, there’s a tailored solution: it’s our processes that adapt to your products… not the other way around.
Robotization and Collaborative Robotics: LACROIX’s Industry of the Future
In three years, ten robots have been implemented at LACROIX’s French site. Following the success of integrating several automated workstations and a complete robotic soldering solution, other automated production lines are soon to be introduced.
From the placement of high-speed lines to the IT infrastructure, everything is prepared to facilitate automation and interconnect all equipment for your mass production.
🎯 Our goal? Expanding our automation portfolio. Our challenge is to become even more responsive and minimize the design and setup lead times of special-purpose machines to ensure the automation of your production as quickly as possible.
🦾⚡The 4 key advantages of automation⚡🦾
- Cost Optimization
- Reduction of Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs)
- Increased Production Speed
- Enhanced Product Quality
In the era of Industry 4.0, automation is one of the pillars of our Smart Industry strategy. But concretely, what projects are we implementing? To find out, discover our latest examples of progressive automation initiatives conducted across the Atlantic.