Last month, two of Formic’s CPG automation experts answered your questions about getting started with automation on your production lines. Danijel Lolic, our VP of Product & Solutions, and Nick DeLong, our Technical Operations Manager, offered key insights into when it’s time to switch from manual to automated, the biggest mistakes they’ve seen operations managers make when deploying automation for the first time, and more.
Listen to the entire Q&A session here. Plus, stay tuned for more segments of our "Ask the Expert" series over the next few weeks.
When is the right time to switch from manual to automated on your production line?
Danijel Lolic (DL): For a lot of operations teams today, they tend to know a lot about what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis. If you’re packing nuts or making a food product, you know all there is to know about that product. You know how to grow, sustain, prepare, and process it. What then tends to happen is that product goes into some type of pack — whether it’s a box, bag, pouch, or carton. That’s where a lot of facilities don’t have as much in-depth knowledge.
What we tend to see is if you have a secondary packaging activity, whether you’re packing bags or boxes by hand, or you are putting those boxes or bags onto a pallet by hand, it’s a really good opportunity to assess whether automation is a good fit for your secondary end-of-line packing space, especially in the CPG world.
A lot of it becomes kind of tethered down to understanding what you’re trying to solve for. Are you seeing that you don’t have enough labor to do a specific activity? Are you seeing a dangerous workflow, and there’s too much exposure from your people stacking pallets to the forklift traffic happening around there? Is it that there are too many repetitive motion injuries? Sometimes it’s that there’s a bottleneck to your production line and you can’t go fast enough. You want to run fast and you’re blocked by what the personnel can do, and sometimes you just need those people doing a more value-added activity somewhere else on the line.
A lot of it boils down to what you’re trying to solve for. If it’s any of those types of individual pieces I’ve listed, it’s a pretty good trigger to consider automation. If you want to make the process faster, more reliable, more robust, or just have safer workflows.
Nick DeLong (ND): Hopefully, one of the major constraints people are seeing is that they can’t produce the product fast enough. If their business is growing, they need that extra capacity or they need an edge over the competition. That’s a big driver as well. Once you automate, then you can have that little gap ahead of your competition and can utilize that to gain more revenue.
I only run one shift. How much volume do I need to justify automation?
DL: It really goes back to the question of how do I know when it’s time to automate my activity. It depends on your goal, and saying “It’s one shift,” or it’s “X number of hours per week,” is just one of the many inputs to consider.
If I’m stacking boxes for eight hours a day and they’re two-pound boxes and they’re running fairly slowly, I’m not going to be taxed in the same way as I am if I’m stacking 50-pound bags all day and running 12 bags a minute. So, you have to ask yourself what you’re solving for. Is it that my people are lifting heavy things, and ergonomics are terrible, and they’re getting injured? That’s the ergonomics and personnel piece to consider when justifying.
There’s also the timepiece to consider. If you’re trying to run a line at 12 bags a minute, but your stackers can’t keep up, and you have to run at eight, that boils down to a production problem. The shift or the hour usage is just one of the inputs. It’s fully understanding what you want to solve for, and that will be a better guide to you to see whether you can justify automation or not.
When it comes back to ROI, and you can go from eight bags a minute to 12 bags a minute, you will see the return get very short on your automation investment, even if you’re only running the solution for four hours a day.
You need to consider all your inputs to answer this question.
I tried installing automation already, and it didn’t end up working for my facility. How can I do it right this time?
ND: First, I’d be curious to know why it didn’t work, but I’ll give you some insight on why I think it might not have worked.
What I’ve seen a lot is that people who want to automate decide to try to automate their “biggest problem” or the most technically challenging thing and make a robot do it. That is inherently the wrong approach, especially when you’re automating for the first time. Taking the most highly complex, highly intricate problem to solve with automation is a very extensive process.
So, it behooves you to look down the line or up the line and try to understand your throughput constraints and pick a bottleneck instead of a technical constraint. Then, instead, try to remove that bottleneck through automation because then you increase your throughput in your overall line, and, by doing that, you have alleviated all the other stressors that applied to the technical problem.
Once you have that automation in place, then you can focus resources on that technical problem. Then get the whole facility, line, and manufacturing group familiar with that automation, understanding its capabilities and constraints, and how it could be applied to that more highly technical problem by applying it to a bottleneck problem.
What are the biggest mistakes that you've seen operations make when starting with automation?
DL: First, I would say that automation, robotics, and technology, these are tools. They’re tools you use to solve a production problem. There's some type of production problem that you set out to solve, or maybe it's a safety problem or maybe it's a cost problem, but there is some type of problem out there and you're looking to leverage this tool. So it’s not about the tool itself, and it’s not about the technology or automation.
Certainly Nick and I find it very interesting, but a project is successful based on what it delivered from a production outcomes perspective — not whether it was a cool piece of technology we put on the production floor.
So, for me, one of the biggest mistakes that I see is that it becomes a workflow problem. Let’s say a robot is going to stack boxes for you on a day-to-day — that’s going to affect the workflows around you. It’s going to affect the way boxes come down the line because before you could just send the boxes down and have people show up and put them on a pallet and it didn’t matter if it was sent down with the right orientation or if the box was sealed because you could trust the person downstream to take care of it. Ultimately, for all the benefits automation brings, it’s not a human being.
ND: One mistake in operations I often see is that, when people are deploying automation, they look at it in a bubble. They say, “We’re going to implement this automation and the only people that know about it are high-level leadership.” They often don’t disseminate that information down to the floor, where the workers who are actually going to be interacting with the equipment are. It’s important because bringing that information to them and including them in the conversation takes away that fear of automation. People are scared of automation for many reasons, mostly because it’s new.
It’s something they think is inherently dangerous and they fear is taking their job. But by bringing them into the fold and letting them know that months from now there is going to be a robot here, and letting them know how they will interact with it, how they will boost their skills, and how they will be trained to work with automation, instead of having it be something they they look at as detrimental to their own work position, is vital.
It’s something I’ve seen on the floor many times, and I’ve seen it both ways: When a whole team is on board and they’re naming the robot Megatron or putting smiley faces on it, and other times it’s a completely different and negative experience.
DL: It’s also an upskilling opportunity. I see a lot of people who were previously stacking 40-pound boxes become robot operators, and then that evolves into line operators or supervisors. There’s this fear of, “Robots are taking jobs,” but what we’re seeing today is robots doing work that humans shouldn’t be doing so they can do more rewarding work.
Where do I get started with automation?
ND: You call Formic and you give us the specifications of what you would like to try!
It depends on what automation you’re talking about. Are you talking about a case packer, a box erector, or a box sealer? The great thing is that Formic does all of those things. We’re a good resource to reach out to and say, “Hey, I’ve got this product. I’m trying to do something with it.”
We can take a look at the product and see if we have a fit for the application, and what it would be. That turnaround is very quick for our assessment and our standard products. If we don’t have something that fits or it’s something outside of what we offer, we will give you some other recommendations.
It’s not only that we’re looking for a business sale, we’re also here to be advocates of automation.
Listen to the entire Q&A session here.