Importance of Automating the production system


Production systems

 A production system can be defined as the collection of people, equipment, and procedures, organized to accomplish the manufacturing operations of a company. Production systems divided into two categories:

Facilities : This includes, production machines and tooling, material handling equipment, inspection equipment. A computer system controls the manufacturing operations here. A plant layout shows the physical arrangement of equipment in the factory. Direct labor people are responsible for this.

Manufacturing support systems : A set of procedures used by the company to manage production and to solve the technical and logistics problems encountered in ordering materials, moving work through the factory, and ensuring that products meet quality standards. A manufacturing support systems contain Product design as well as certain business functions. Professional staff people are responsible for this.

Importance of quality control

The quality of the product and its components should meet the standards specified by the product designer. To an extent, quality control depends on inspection activities performed in the factory at various times during the manufacture of the product.

Automated Manufacturing Systems

 

The long-term trend in manufacturing is toward greater use of automated machines to substitute for manual labor . This is made possible by applying advances in technology to factory operations. The operations includes processing, assembly, inspection, or material handling. They perform their operations with a reduced level of human participation or  virtually no human participation.

Some automated manufacturing systems

1.  Automated machine tools and  process parts.

2.  Automated assembly systems.

3.  Manufacturing systems that use industrial robots to perform processing or   assembly operations.

4.  Automatic material handling and storage systems that integrates  manufacturing operations.

5.  Automatic inspection systems for quality control.

6.  Transfer lines that perform a series of machining operations.

Automation types and features

Fixed automation is a system in which the equipment configuration fixes the  sequence of processing or assembly operation. In programmable automation, the production equipment is designed with the capability to change the sequence of operations to accommodate different product configurations.Flexible automation is an extension of programmable automation. A flexible automated system is capable of producing a variety of parts or products with no time lost for changeovers from one part style to the next.

Various tools of industrial automation includes – Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), robotics,Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) which is of a Multiple input and output arrangement.For Controlling industrial automation equipment,Human Machine Interface (HMI) is using nowadays. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is responsible in processing information. Distributed Control System (DCS) for Monitoring networks.

 Reasons that justify automation

It is important point that automation increases production rate and  labor productivity. Replaced manual operations reduce unit product cost. Mitigates  the effects of labor shortages in many advanced nations by the development of automated operations as a substitute for labor.

Automation not only results in higher production rates than manual operations.  It also performs the process with greater uniformity and conformity to quality specifications. Even the reduction of fraction defect rate is considered as one of the major  benefits of automation. It reduces or eliminate routine manual and clerical tasks. Automating such tasks thus improves  the general level of working conditions.

The safety and physical well-being of the worker became a national objective after the Occupational Safety and Health Act. By automating  a given operation, it is possible to transfer the worker from active participation in the process to a supervisory role makes the work safer.

Automation  reduces the elapsed time between customer order and product delivery. By reducing this time, the manufacturer also reduces work-in-process inventory. This provides a competitive advantage to the manufacturer for future orders. To accomplish processes that requires high precision, miniaturization, or complexity of geometry tat are not possible to do manually. This operations include certain integrated circuit fabrication operations which are  not possible  without the aid of a machine.

The rare cases in which manual labor preferred over automation

When Certain tasks became very difficult to automate, Manual labor is used to perform the tasks in these cases. The Reasons include

  1. Adjustments required in the task
  2. Manual dexterity requirements

3. Demands on hand-eye coordination

An example is the automobile final assembly lines where human workers accomplish the final trim operations. if a company is going to  design and introduce a product in a short period of time to be on the market for a relatively short period.  Here the manufacturing method designed around manual labor allows a much faster and economical product launch than does an automated method.

Humans are more flexible than any automated machine.If the customer requires a one-of-a-kind item with unique features, then manual labor is the appropriate production resource. Manual labor is using  to augment the output of an existing automated system during those periods when demand exceeds the capacity of the automated system.The use of manual labor as the productive resource at the beginning of the Product’s life will reduces the company’s risk. Because, the failure of product to achieve a long market life may lose a significant investment in automation.

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