You might have heard business owners in the manufacturing community talk about “automation” and “robotics,” but how do you know if your facility could benefit from an automation solution?
Total vs Partial Automation
Well, the first thing to remember is that most automation projects don’t strive for the kind total automation that you see on TV shows like How It’s Made, where there isn’t a person in sight. In fact, for the vast majority of manufacturers and packagers, total automation won’t ever be the most efficient thing to do. Most of the time, the key is to automate the right tasks – the most repetitive and draining ones, or the ones where robots can actually do a better job - so your people can spend their time where they’re most effective and most needed.
Cobots (collaborative robots) live at the forefront of contemporary automation technology, and they’re the best tool in creating the type of mixed human-and-robot production floor that makes the most sense for so many manufacturing and packaging companies. Unlike traditional robots, cobots are responsive to their environments, which means they’re safe for humans to work alongside.
Chances are that there are plenty of tasks that you could automate with cobots, boosting efficiency, accuracy, morale, and more. But you know that already; the hard part is figuring out which technology is smart enough and flexible enough to do what you need it to do, and then figuring out how to pay for it.
How We Make Robots Accessible
At Tutor, we lease versatile, drop-in cobot systems to facilities of all sizes for $12/hr and nothing upfront. We studied facilities that don’t have robots on their lines to understand what’s missing from the options that are already out there, and then we built both our technology and our business model for the real world – to make cobots accessible to those operations.
What we learned is that: 1) most automation companies demand so much cash upfront that the project is over before it even starts, and 2) automation that does get implemented effectively squashes facilities’ versatility and demands that the whole place is rebuilt to accommodate the new tech.
We rewrote the story to get robots into facilities that they’ve never been before. We said “versatile, drop-in cobot systems to facilities of all sizes for $12/hr.”
By “drop-in,” we mean that there’s nothing to install, which means you never have to pause operation to get Tutor cobots going; all they need is power and WiFi and a bit of space on the floor.
By “versatile,” we mean that our cobots can switch jobs with only a couple of minutes of downtime, allowing facilities to maintain the flexibility that is their lifeblood.
And by “$12/hr,” we mean exactly that: $12/hr. All OpEx. No CapEx. Nothing upfront. We know that most facilities don’t have millions of dollars to throw at a problem – even if it’s a big problem. So we’ve designed our business to work within the real constraints of the real world.
So do robots belong in your facility? We suspect that the answer is yes. Reach out to us to start a conversation; no commitments expected. Let’s talk cobots!
