Collaborative Robots Help Clients In Printing Industry to Stand Out in the Fierce Competition
The traditional printing industry is facing enormous challenges as market consumption evolves and demographic dividends disappear. Labor costs are soaring, while clients place increasingly demanding requirements for product quality. The only way for businesses to secure their presence in the market is to shift to automatic production and flexible production. However, the complexity and cost of transformation have been plaguing most businesses.
01 Background
This client is a professional system solution provider that focuses on the development, manufacture, and service of post-press equipment. It has been engaged in the development of post-press equipment and post-print assembly process services since 2003. In recent years, it has largely used special machines in some standard processes of post-press, improving efficiency and product quality. After experiencing the high-efficiency benefits of automation, the customer is more confident in using robots to replace human labor for finishing simple, repetitive and boring applications.
02 Pain point
Due to the particularity of the post-press treatment process in the printing industry, there is no such production line yet in the industry. Highly independent of work sections and high dependence on human labor are application pain points in this industry. The glue binding and loading process, for example, is inefficient. Workers are prone to physical fatigue after handling book folds to the glue binding machine and performing monotonous and repetitive loading, which can lead to errors. The surge in demand for orders in recent years has placed even higher demands on equipment automation. Therefore, during the entire transformation process, the client came up with a bold idea to increase the productivity of individual machines, reduce machine downtime, and ensure that the client maximizes machine utilization and production capacity.
03 Solution
ELITE Robot fully understood the client's needs and recommended a 6kg cobot (EC66) with integrated special cylinders to perform glue binding and loading. The robot completes the book glue binding by feeding the cut-out book horizontally into the glue binder. Such cases which appear to be simple tell that the real status of automation transformation is from simple to difficult.
Cobots are used in glue binding machine to handle small to medium batch and multi-variety, small-batch digital printing and post-press automation for on-demand inkjet printing, providing clients with post-press production process management planning and stapling solutions. It also achieves high productivity in book-to-book variable production, eliminating tedious set-up times and dependence on technicians, thus ensuring consistent and reliable productivity and high-quality glue binding production.
Cobots based on industrial design concepts empower people and make glue binding flexible according to demand. The cobot has a small size, flexible configuration, ease of programming, and does not require the operator to be proficient in programming languages. Ordinary workers can operate it proficiently after training, which is safe and reliable. After the first attempt to apply cobots in single-station transformation, the client also plans to apply it to other.
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