For many product-based businesses, automation is the key to business growth. When you automate your manufacturing, it allows you to increase increase output and productivity while lowering operating costs and improving quality.
If your business has a lot of repetitive processes, and you’re experiencing a high degree of variability with your manual processes, automation can help remove the variability and produce consistent, reliable quality. To realise all of those benefits, it’s important that you work closely with your automation partner to identify your requirements.
Who should automate?
Automation is beneficial for a lot of product-based businesses, but it’s not the right solution for everyone. Depending on what stage you are at in your business, and what your unique business model is, automation may be the ideal solution or a costly mistake.
That’s why we work closely with all of our potential clients to make sure that automation is the best interest of their business as it stands today.
Sometimes we tend to think of automation as being on a large scale, but it’s not always necessary to automate on a wide scale. Some processes can be automated with some small changes to existing equipment, and sometimes only certain parts of the process need to be automated.
When is the best time to automate?
There’s no specific ‘best’ time to automate, but there are some important pieces that need to be in place before you consider automation.
• Your processes need to be fit for purpose before you automate. Automation will speed up your production, but if you have flaws in your existing processes, automation won’t fix that.
• The best processes to automate are repetitive and don’t need a human worker to apply judgement. AI is improving every year, but robots are still a long way from being able to apply common sense and judgement.
• You need a good understanding of the ROI that you can expect and have a reasonable budget allocated. Get crystal clear on which processes you want to automate and exactly how automation will improve them.
What information do we need to help you?
Making the decision to automate is a big one, and it’s important that you share the right information, at the right level, with your automation partner. When you’re opting for bespoken automation, this is crucial to ensure that you get the right solution as quickly as possible.
Of course, sharing your business information with a third party can seem daunting, but most of the planning can be done without you giving any sensitive information to your automation partner. At Innomech, we’ve devised a process that means we don’t need a lot of granular detail, but that allows us to capture just enough information to devise the right solution for your business.
The information we need is all captured in our User Requirements Specification (URS)
• Purpose
• Project Background
• Scope
• Budget
• Assumptions
• Constraints
• Specification summary
• Parts
• System Specification
• Safety Requirements
• Life Cycle Requirements
• Project Requirements
As the experts in bespoke automation, we understand the challenges and barriers that you face. We take a collaborative approach to help guide you towards the perfect automation solution for your business. If you would like more information, then please contact us. Our automation consultants would be delighted to discuss your requirements further.
