Manufacturing automation is the use of technology to automate production processes. This isn’t limited to just robots; it also includes software for equipment and systems for analyzing production data. Learn more!
Today’s manufacturers face complex challenges, from ever-changing supply chains to the growing demand for sustainable practices. To maintain competitiveness, innovative solutions are needed that boost efficiency, reduce costs, and leverage technology for smarter, more agile decision-making.
Manufacturing automation emerges as an essential pillar. It drives productivity, reduces errors and waste, and enables efficient data collection that enhances decision-making.
To thrive, companies must embrace change, adapting and intelligently optimizing their operations. It’s crucial to understand the role of automation and innovation not just to keep pace with the market, but to shape it.
What Is Manufacturing Automation?
Manufacturing automation leverages advanced technology, machines, and software to streamline production with minimal human input. By automating repetitive or complex tasks, businesses can achieve greater efficiency, reduce errors, and lower costs.
Automation is reshaping industries. Automotive manufacturers depend on robotic arms for precise, high-speed assembly. Food and beverage companies use automated packaging systems to manage large-scale operations seamlessly.
In pharmaceuticals, automation ensures accuracy in critical processes like pill sorting and labeling, meeting strict regulations while boosting productivity.
These automations reduce operational costs, boost productivity, minimize errors, and allow you and your team to focus on tasks that cannot be automated.
This way, on one side, you have robots and other technologies handling repetitive activities with far greater agility and fewer chances of error than humans could achieve. On the other, your team is freed from these operational tasks, allocating efforts to activities that demand analysis, management, and complex problem-solving.
Furthermore, these technologies also enable machine monitoring, making it possible to study the root causes of tool issues and prevent prolonged production interruptions through predictive maintenance.
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What are the 6 types of automation?
Manufacturing automation offers a range of tailored solutions to meet diverse production needs. Here’s a quick look at the key types, designed to drive efficiency and support your business growth.
- Fixed automation: best for high-volume, repetitive production. Examples include car assembly lines and bottling plants;
- Programmable automation: suitable for batch production where tasks change periodically. CNC machines and injection molding systems are prime examples;
- Flexible automation: ideal for low-volume, high-mix production. Robotic arms and automated guided vehicles (AGVs) adapt quickly to different tasks;
- Integrated automation: combines machines, software, and processes into a unified system. Often seen in smart factories, it uses IoT and AI to optimize the entire production flow;
- Industrial robotics: robots programmed for specific tasks like welding, painting, or packaging, improving speed and precision;
- Autonomous automation: leverages AI and machine learning to make decisions in real time. Used in quality control systems to identify and correct defects on the fly.
By understanding these types, manufacturers can confidently choose the right approach to boost efficiency, ensure quality, and stay agile in meeting evolving demands.
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What Are the Benefits of Manufacturing Automation?
Manufacturing automation brings a range of benefits that help businesses stay competitive and efficient in an evolving market. Productivity gains, error reduction, increased safety for employees, and improved product quality are just a few examples.
Let’s now look at the main benefits of automation in industry.
Reduced Operational Costs
Automating manufacturing workflows helps reduce operational costs. This happens by lessening manual labor, which allows for optimized resource use through fewer errors and less waste.
What’s more, machines don’t need breaks like people do, nor do they come with other employee-related costs. Add to that the fact that machines typically have a much higher per-hour output than individuals.
They don’t need to rest, they don’t get tired, they don’t gradually slow down as the day goes on, and they certainly don’t take coffee breaks. The sum of all this leads to productivity gains that lower your operational and unit costs, resulting in greater profitability.
Of course, this requires an initial investment in machinery, but it typically pays for itself over time.
Improved Quality and Reduced Production Errors
When dealing with unautomated, repetitive workflows, we’re exposed to a high chance of human error or even imprecision in manufacturing. Automating processes in manufacturing virtually eliminates the possibility of these errors occurring.
Machines can perform repetitive activities far more consistently and precisely over time. This not only reduces the chances of error, thereby preventing resource waste, but also ensures that the quality standard is maintained or even elevated.
All of this will ultimately lead to a reduction in return rates for orders or for defective or imperfect products that end up being unusable.
Real-Time Data Generation
Modern automation systems generate real-time data that manufacturers can use to optimize processes and make smarter decisions. This allows your company to collect and analyze data optimally, improving decision-making.
Many automated systems are designed to be more energy-efficient and allow you to monitor your consumption indicators. This contributes to reducing material waste and energy consumption, as well as supporting sustainability efforts.
Thus, managers gain a broad and complete view of energy consumption, use of inputs and production resources, average production time, delivery projections, and other performance indicators.
This isn’t just data; it’s effectively information that enables the identification of bottlenecks and areas for improvement to enhance production.
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Improved Workplace Safety
The use of machines allows for replacing humans in tasks previously considered dangerous. These tasks incurred costs related to equipment, incident care, and, most importantly, posed risks to the health and lives of the company’s workers.
With machines handling these types of activities, workers remain safe, and the company can reallocate its resources to more productive tasks, ultimately reducing safety-related expenses for such cases.
Customer Experience & Automation Productivity Gains
Automation also helps manufacturers do more than survive the boom and bust economic cycles and smooth out internal production challenges, it also helps achieve one of the most imperative initiatives – customer satisfaction.
Amazon has set a high bar that customers have come to expect in regards to speed and transparency when they order products. From order placement all the way to the doorstep, customers want to be able to see what’s happening.
When organizations rely on outdated workflows heavy on paperwork and light on transparency, they risk alienating customers and failing to foster those strong relationships.
Claris FileMaker-driven solutions allow you to build customer experiences that meet and achieve this higher bar of transparency and speed.
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Why Do Manual Workflows Create Inefficiencies?
A primary driver of inefficiency in many manufacturing organizations are error-prone manual workflows from back office to production floor to shipping. Poor data management and endless manual paperwork mean that at every step where data has to be communicated or translated, there is another entry point for human error.
These manual workflows are not only error-prone, they are often slow and create accountability challenges. Without comprehensive in-house inventory or supply data, production can find itself halted due to lack of materials and delays in sourcing.
When the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, there is no transparency internally (to the team) or externally (to the customer) where in production an order is, efforts are duplicated, while other tasks slip through the cracks.
Manufacturing automations are necessary to create an efficient production pipeline, reduce errors, and increase transparency and accountability.
How to Start Automating Manufacturing Processes?
It’s common to have questions when it comes to automating your industry’s production processes, especially since there are different types of automation. Besides acquiring the machines and equipment that will perform the tasks, one of the most crucial points is machine monitoring.
Machine monitoring is the process of generating, extracting, storing, and tracking data from the equipment used. This way, as processes are automated, you can simultaneously keep tabs on who’s responsible for the machines, their operating periods, when and why they’re shut down, and even monitor the condition of their parts to anticipate potential problems.
This data also needs to be integrated with your company’s internal systems to enable and automate internal communication between departments. Information must update automatically from one end whenever it’s changed in another.
That’s why it’s essential to invest in machine monitoring software that can be integrated with the tools your company already uses. This ensures a healthy and organized industrial automation process.
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Manufacturing Automation: Aircraft Components Client Case Study
Codence partnered with a leading manufacturer of electronic components for aircraft, spacecraft, and satellites to transform their production tracking system.
The client’s outdated manual processes—paper job sheets and plastic envelopes—slowed operations and reduced transparency. Codence developed an iPad-based application integrated with a central database, enabling workers to scan barcodes for job check-ins and check-outs, access schematics instantly, and track production stages in real time.
The impact was significant: a 25-30% increase in production throughput, $15,000+ in annual labor savings, higher employee productivity, and real-time order updates for the sales team. These improvements streamlined operations and boosted efficiency.
Read the full case study to learn more!
What Are the Trends in Manufacturing Automation?
Manufacturing automation is evolving through innovation, adaptability, and sustainability. By leveraging AI, IoT, and robotics, manufacturers are optimizing operations, increasing flexibility, and meeting the growing need for efficiency and eco-friendly solutions.
These advancements empower businesses to stay competitive and drive growth more efficiently and productively. The combination of Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, and robotics has increasingly fueled the debate about the possibility of 100% automated factories in the not-too-distant future.
This would mean enormous resource savings on energy, snacks, and coffee. It would also open up the possibility of increasing working hours (since they are no longer performed by humans) while drastically reducing waste from failures and boosting both quality and production volume.
Of course, some human intervention will still be necessary, whether for repairs, managing these technologies, or performance monitoring, but on a much smaller scale than what happens today.
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Codence Can Help
Here at Codence, we are a team of Claris specialists, Interface designers, analytics experts, and finance gurus dedicated to creating custom-crafted solutions for your business. With a Codence-built FileMaker solution, you will finally be able to see all your data, workflows, and accounting in one place, and reach manufacturing efficiency levels like never before.
Ready to take your operations to the next level? Connect with Codence specialists for a free consultation and explore how automation can transform your manufacturing processes. Request your consultation today.
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