Bargaining Yourself to Death: Why You Can’t Ignore Pick and Place Robotics
Pick and Place Robots and Robotic Picking Systems present a measured, secure, and reliable way to drastically improve consistency, quality, safety, revenue, and scalability in all manufacturing industries, but that hasn’t stopped manufacturers from being seduced by inadequate alternatives. Even in the face of an ongoing job crisis, price competition from overseas manufacturing, technologically dependent supply chain challenges, and increasing barriers to market entry, manufacturers fall behind bargaining their businesses to death instead of investing in pick and place systems. Today we look at the problems that a pick and place system can easily solve for your manufacturing and show you where the decision to deploy turnkey pick and place automation leads to responsible and meaningful growth and revenue. We also show how any of the plans to not deploy pick and place robotics are just schemes that give a leg up to your competition.
Real Manufacturing Solutions vs. Limited Strategies in Pick and Place Applications
Manufacturers in need of pick and place systems for their manufacturing are facing a mixture of major crises on the horizon and a mounting series of serious combination issues slowly poisoning their ability to operate consistently, safely, and at a profit.
Pick and Place Robotics: The Only Way to Compete With Overseas Labor
American manual labor has no way to compete on even footing with overseas manual labor on cost of labor alone in pick and place applications.
- Overseas Values: An unequal sense of worker value, safety, and quality allow overseas manufacturers to undercut American cost of labor. They compromise standards that American manufacturers rightly refuse to jeopardize and treat it as savings.
- Low Wages: On average Chinese manufacturers can afford to throw four laborers at pick and place tasks for the compensation of one American laborer. Even the leanest American manufacturer can’t outprice overseas pick and place labor with manual labor.
- Tariff Limitations: Tariffs, like the recent tariffs on a variety of technology and steel goods, do help onshore manufacturers compete with overseas manufacturers, but they aren’t perfect. Tariff benefits blunt savings by inflating the prices of products and trickling that inflation down to the supply lines. Tariffs can also be repealed, altered, or reduced, so while it’s great to exploit the advantages of tariffs, it’s not a promising idea to bet your pick and place applications on continuous financial leeway from tariffs.
Even with the lower cost of labor compensation overseas, leading manufacturers are bringing their pick and place manufacturing back to the United States with pick and place robotics and pick and place systems. Overseas labor only saves you on labor. Each of these items not only allows you to compete on cost with overseas manual pick and place applications, pick and place robotics outstrip overseas revenue potential.
- Robot Pick and Place for Efficient Labor: If you can’t find labor, the labor you have is too expensive, and you can’t compete on price with overseas manual pick and place, get a robotic pick and place solution. We’ve found pick and place systems on average reduce the costs of manufacturing related to manual labor to roughly 20%. You’re suddenly competing with overseas labor with more control, less risk, and tangible assets instead of putting money in someone else’s pocket.
- Robot Pick and Place for Supply Chain Control: Reshoring using pick and place robotics allows you to sidestep long and unpredictable international lead times. A single bottleneck can wipe out a year’s worth of savings related to outsourced overseas manufacturing. Onshore pick and place robotics gives you control, control means predictability, and predictability means actionable data.
- Robot Pick and Place for Safety Savings: A pick and place system comes with safety training and predictable production. Pick and place robotics offload the kind of work that causes accidents, shutdowns, lawsuits, and workman’s comp claims. You get less expensive manufacturing and the right to claim you are improving your work environment for your employees.
- Robot Pick and Place for Speed: If you need more speed with a four person pick and place application, you need to hire another group of four to increase manual pick and place production. If you need more shifts, you must do that again for manual work. With pick and place robotics, you can install a turnkey system capable of lights out unattended manufacturing twenty four hours a day. You can have the specifications built into the pick and place for ramp up, slow down, and delays without having to worry about managing worker hours, no shows, late shows, and short notice quitting bottlenecks.
- Robot Pick and Place for Consistency: One of the biggest tradeoffs you get with overseas manual labor in pick and place applications, especially when you outsource to multiple different countries for assembly parts, are different standards of consistency. Customer complaints about flaws, non-functional runs, and defects eat into your profits with rework and harm to your reputation. With pick and place robotics, your pick and place system creates intricate parts, assemblies, and micromachined detail with machine precision every time.
- Robot Pick and Place for Quality: Quality fluctuates in overseas manual pick and place work. Different people already have different capacities for professionalism, attention, and ability, add distinct cultural norms, international standards of quality, inability to address issues on sight, and a lack of investment from a third party to the costs you’re have to eat on rework in pick and place applications. You shouldn’t allow tasks simple enough to be completed with a pick and place robot or system to hurt your bottom line, growth, and reputation.
- Robot Pick and Place for Intellectual Property Protection: Companies that farm their pick and place manufacturing overseas open themselves to intellectual property theft, trademark infringement, and watching logo less copies of their products manufactured and resold from the same overseas warehouse. You have a one in five chance of losing your hard won product IP over pick and place tasks if you go overseas.
Learn how to understand the hidden ROI of automated manufacturing.
Labor Struggles in Pick and Place Applications
There is a dark irony in focusing your business strategy on hiring more labor when the problem is there is no labor, but companies that don’t fill out their pick and place applications with pick and place robotics wager their livelihoods on this losing bet every day. When demand comes from the supply line, ‘I don’t have the workers on my manufacturing’ is an effective way to announce a business is closing their doors forever. Here’s why pick and place applications are so hard to fill with labor in modern manufacturing:
Repetitive Work: Pick and place applications are what they sound like.
- A product, part, piece, or package is picked up and moved into a new position.
- In high volume manufacturing, thousands of parts a shift need to be moved in exactly the same way in exactly the same orientation and singulation.
- This monotonous work represents the highest turnover for employees.
- A thinking person loses interest in moving a box.
Ergonomically Challenging Work: Repetitive pick and place applications strain the human body in the same way thousands of times a day.
- Pick and place applications don’t care if you’re tired, if you’re sick, or if an aching back is about to turn into a back injury.
- Even without considering the immediate risks of heavy lifting, clearance issues, and the variable worker details like age, size, strength, and health, repetitive workday in and day out wears down cartilage, strains muscles, weakens tendons and ligaments, and compresses spines.
- Pick and place operations are physically demanding, and workers quickly burn out.
Dangerous Work: Ask any worker whether they would stay in their dangerous job if they could get a similar safe job with equal compensation, and you’ll watch them leave their dangerous job.
- Quality products often require exposure to potentially life-threatening temperatures, chemicals, tools, lack of ventilation, and other work environment related dangers.
- These pick and place applications are at best an expensive liability to micromanage, and at worst production halting workman’s comp and injury claims.
Lack of Upward Mobility: In creative tasks, (non-pick and place applications) there are chances to improve processes, to gain sales, and to change the course of a company with innovative ideas.
- There are opportunities to be noticed for exemplary work and pipelines to promote into larger theaters of job opportunity.
- In non-creative tasks (pick and place applications), the goal is to repeat the same process over and over with no deviation.
- The only opportunity for a worker in pick and place applications is the opportunity to record failure.
- The best pick and place application workers have no achievements.
Low Wages: A combination of the simplicity of pick and place applications and competition with overseas manual labor means American pick and place applications have the lowest compensation for American labor.
- Pick and place applications have the least job security.
- American workers cannot retire on the wages from pick and place applications, so pick and place applications run by manual labor tend to run on a revolving door of temp workers.
- The American workforce has no reason to put effort into filling these pick and place applications, and that lack of effort translates to a lack of consistency, accountability, and profitability in American manufacturing floors.
- By contrast, our manufacturers are discovering that as labor wages go up, the cost to run a robot goes down.
Learn more about how to overcome the labor crisis with robotic solutions.
Pick and Place Robotics for Growth
If you give away money to a third party overseas pick and place manufacturer, that money doesn’t work for you anymore. You get your products and nothing else. If you invest in pick and place robotics you get:
- Data: The IIOT advantage of integrating pick and place systems into your business is how easy it is to track data on your manufacturing. Machine status, production records, maintenance schedules, training, and shipping volumes are all tools you can use to stop relying on gut instinct and start relying on concrete reporting from your pick and place system.
- Assets: Pick and Place Robotics are assets you can claim in the valuation of the business. You can claim depreciation of a pick and place robot on taxes. In some instances, equipment can be sold or traded.
- A Manufacturing Line: You get a physical, tangible, manufacturing line you have total control over. You never negotiate, argue, or placate with a pick and place robot. A pick and place robot can potentially be reallocated, reprogrammed, or extended with post processing and secondary processing robotics.
Pick and Place Robotics for Any Application
With the help of a custom automated machine builder, you can get any pick and place application scoped, designed, built, and integrated to match your manufacturing needs. While every manufacturer is different, every production floor has these common pick and place applications:
- Pick and Place Assembly: Your pick and place robot can pick up parts from a conveyor belt, tray, vibratory bowl, or other automated feeding system and assemble it onto another workpiece on a conveyor. This can sometimes even involve direct processes like using an articulated robot arm to apply adhesive, holding items for assembly, assembling kits, welding, die cutting, folding, shaping, or dispensing powders and liquids onto products or into containers.
- Pick and Place Packaging: Your pick and place robot can identify parts and put them into boxes for shipping or shelving. This can also include applying labels to products or packaging, wrapping products in plastic, sealing products into packaging with tape or glue, or stamping print or logos onto packaging or products.
- Pick and Place Stacking and Sorting: Sometimes referred to as bin picking, your pick and place robot uses complex sensors to separate parts from mixed bins and organize them by size, shape, or other criteria. Some stacking and sorting robots are even powerful enough to stack large amounts of products on pallets for storage or shipping and load or unload delivery trucks or shipping containers.
- Pick and Place Inspection: Your robot uses an integrated vision system to quickly examine and test products for quality, defects, or irregularities. The machine can then grab and discard divergent parts.
Learn more about Pick and Place Automation in Assembly Lines
Pick and Place Robotic Technology
Don’t let yourself be limited by the image of a single pick and place robot type. Pick and place automation can adapt to payload, reach, cycle time, product shape, end effector tools, safety, precision, and repeatability with swift ROI. Modern pick and place robotics has evolved past early robot arms. Check out these versatile types of common pick and place robots:
- Cartesian robots- Sometimes referred to as a Gantry or Linear robot, these robots typically use box frame construction with tracks that span the production line. They can accurately do simpler actions like pick and place or more complex tasks like injection molding with high speed and accuracy.
- Fast Pick Robots- These are robots designed for speed, some capable of 150 cycles per minute. These are ideal for simple and quick sorting tasks.
- Articulated Robotic Arms- A programmable robotic arm equipped with an end effector such as a gripper or tool head. Current models have five or six axes capable of complex moving, stacking, or assembling.
- Cobots- Sometimes called collaborative robots, cobots have force limitations, energy limitations, and additional safety features built in to match the speed and workflow of a human worker. Humans can work alongside the robot for real time guided manufacturing tasks.
- SCARA robots- Called a ‘Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm’ or Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arm,’ SCARA robots have parallel axis joints that restrict them from vertical movement but allow for rapid assembly on XY plane.
- Delta robots- These triangular top mounted robots use translational degrees of freedom granted by their parallelogram shaped forearms to connect the bottom base to an end effector tool or gripper. They bring a high level of flexibility and precision to their picking and can even be used for 3D printing.
Pick and Place Robotics for Any Industry
With all these robotic pick and place options available, superior capacity for growth, and business forward advantages, it’s no surprise that any manufacturing environment can benefit from a pick and place machine. There’s no industry too complex, too simple, too vast, or too niche for pick and place robotic manufacturing. Every industry has pick and place applications including:
Learn more about Pick and Place Robotic Integration with DEVELOP LLC
Pick and Place Robotics Before it’s Too Late
As futuristic as pick and place robotics feel, especially if you’re new to pick and place automation, pick and place systems are no longer a secret. The first companies to adopt fully automated robotic pick and place systems were like the first spectator to stand in a movie theater with completely unobstructed view while everyone else is sitting. If you’re reading this today, you might feel more like a person sitting in that theater, trying to see around all the other spectators who are already standing.
It’s time to stand up for your manufacturing with pick and place robotics. By partnering with a custom automated machine integrator, you can guarantee a pick and place system capable of bolstering your growth, revenue, safety, consistency, efficiency, and ability to compete. Your products deserve every advantage. You deserve to leave your competition behind for using failing strategies for overseas manufacturing, manual labor, and ‘wait and see.’
At DEVELOP LLC our project managers, manufacturing experts, and engineers understand the wide array of options available when choosing your custom machine options. Whether you are a first time or veteran industrial automator, our Automation Assessments target every process in your business to increase productivity, improve efficiency, drive consistency, maintain quality and guarantee safety.
Tell us more about your project, try our Automation Assessment Questionnaire, or call (262)-622-6104 and let us educate you on how to reach the untapped potential of your manufacturing with pick and place automated solutions.
About the Author:
Matt Moseman leads as President of DEVELOP, with a strong foundation from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he earned both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s in New Product Management. Moseman’s career highlights include his pivotal role in founding NodeUDesign, innovating in automation hardware, and driving DEVELOP LLC to the forefront of industrial robotics with a focus on enhancing productivity and efficiency.