The benefits of automation
Published on : Wednesday 02-08-2023
The benefits of automation are far too numerous to recall and repeat in a few paragraphs, and more importantly, too well known to the industry.
To put it simply, automation helps manufacturers keep costs low while improving quality, and ramp up capacity rapidly to meet demand. The automobile industry is an early example – in fact it is the automobile industry that promoted automation right from the early days when Henry Ford installed the first assembly line in 1913. The system improved productivity tremendously taking the work to the worker, building the automobile step by step as it moved forward the line, a vast improvement over workers moving individual vehicles chassis around the shop floor, building the car. The introduction of robots in the 1960s further boosted productivity to meet the never ending demand for the latest models.
Even as the benefits of automation are obvious, high initial cost and the complexities in adoption have put it out of reach of many businesses, especially the SMEs. This is now changing with emerging technologies making it easier to adopt, as well as economies of scale bringing the cost of hardware down. Robots, for example, are comparatively cheaper today thanks to the advances made in technology, and are also easier to programme. The new breed of collaborative robots or cobots, and autonomous mobile robots has further reduced complexities for deployment. The 16 edition of Automation Expo scheduled from August 23rd to 26th, 2023, at Mumbai’s NSE Complex at Goregaon will be a good place to look for the latest solutions.
The cover story in this edition of Industrial Automation, Digital Transformation in Intralogistics, has interesting perspectives from domain experts on the recent trends that are revolutionising this critical industry segment.
