Automating a food handling production line is becoming increasingly more important these days.  With the ongoing pandemic and labor shortages affecting virtually all businesses big and small, moving from an unreliable manual workforce to robotic automation is essential.  A leading food manufacturer came to us intent on enhancing their production line with robotic automation.

Many businesses rely on machines that are decades old, and those machines develop a great deal of wear and tear over time. Maintenance costs and down-time for repairs can be a costly expense and severely hinder production line throughput. An automotive parts manufacturer came to Midwest Engineered Systems afflicted with that very problem.

As your business grows, so will the demands on your manufacturing throughput.  However, if the original manufacturer of your existing automation system is no longer in business, you will be forced to look elsewhere to expand your automation throughput.  A leading national cheese supplier came to Midwest Engineered Systems with that very problem. 

When you were at a catered event, did you ever think about the process that went into wrapping the napkin around the disposable eating utensils?  The traditional thought would be that people worked tirelessly for hours wrapping the utensils, however with rising labor costs and the shortage of available workers, simple manual work such as that, is not realistic.

Midwest Engineered Systems built a robotic palletizing system that could move over 80 cases per minute. The robotic integration required no tooling changes to accommodate varying case sizes, or to handle the layer slip sheets. This system also utilizes an automated pallet dispenser, and can produce multiple pallet patterns.

MWES designed a single manual production line for a firm that could manufacture over a dozen different variations of a hydraulic motor. The line utilizes a large number of sub-assembly stations, where workers perform the required tasks based on the specific variant of the motor being assembled.

With the current ongoing labor shortage, skilled welders are in short supply leaving many businesses to rely more heavily on robotics to fill that void.  Fully automating a 24/7 welding operation is not as complicated or as intimidating as it may sound. What if the production line requires multiple stations or has to handle different metal types? 

Midwest Engineered System built a fully automated assembly line that required no manual labor to perform the assembly operation. Robots using a vision system would pick and sort the multiple types of triggers as they travel on a single conveyor. On a separate conveyor, filled bottles would arrive at the bottle assembly station.

When you're riding on the subway, most people don't think about how the cart they are riding in was assembled much less the process behind it. MWES built a robotic welding system that would allow a single robot on an overhead gantry to work in tandem with human workers safely.

Automation systems come in a variety of sizes. Some are small enough to process sensitive medical operations. They scale up from there to robotic systems that can process parts the size or weight of a car and beyond.

Automating high volume production operations is relatively straight forward: design a specialized machine that only produces one part. The rest of the time is spent to make it robust enough to do it at speed and for a long time before service.

In the automation world, many times it’s the gripper that packs the most innovation on a system. The grippers are where the automation system actually interacts with the products moving through the cell.

Many don’t realize that robot arms can be equipped with an EOAT that is capable of cleanly grabbing multiple products at once. Our custom designed robot gripper made this palletizing process a breeze.

Economies are opening up and demand for many products and services are surging. It’s predicted that most companies will see massive demand for their products in the near future, if it hasn’t happened already.

Knowing when to automate processes can be a tricky prospect. When looking at replacing a highly skilled, yet difficult to fill human operation like production welding with robotic systems, the question can become even more murky.

We’ve put together three important truths about collaborative robots that a manufacturing engineer or manager should understand before taking the plunge on a cobot for their processes.

A part of what we pride ourselves at Midwest Engineered Systems is keeping up to speed on the latest technologies in automation. With that in mind, we’ve brought in one of FANUC’s latest collaborative robots from the CRX series of industrial robots.

Knowing exactly how tight tolerances need to be can go a long way in reducing production system costs. Over-specifying tolerances will move integrators from more cost-effective machines to expensive, highly-specialized equipment.

This month Midwest Engineered Systems is celebrating 30 years in the automation industry. MWES started in 1991 by Scott Woida, and has grown to be a leading provider of automation systems for a large cross-section of industries.

Over the course of their lifetime, production line automation systems begin to lose efficiency. Replacing with a completely new system would definitely improve throughput and would bring the machine production tracking technology up to date.