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When you’re looking to add automation to a current factory or order fulfillment space, it’s critical to understand what you can and can’t achieve within a reasonable cost and timeline. This requires assessment of existing automation and what automation is feasible with further development. This is a time for extreme care. Investing time and money into automation when meaningful payback and risk isn’t known can lead to wasted efforts and worse. Ultimately, a failed effort can leave a bad impression of automation on the team and broader leadership for years (or even decades) to come. To avoid these pitfalls, here are five steps I’ve developed with our company’s lead engineer Philip Blackwelder to help guide your own facility to smart automation results. 1. Understand feasibility Understanding the true feasibility and the anticipated cost is the first step. While full process automation may be your initial desire, it may be better to approach it as a longer-term process. In the near term, some steps may be better served by manual or semi-automated processes while you wait for technologies and equipment to further develop. Initially focus on the areas where you can implement lower-risk automation sooner, with a higher assurance of success, and at a more accessible cost. Featured Video An Inc.com Featured Presentation 2. Build a master plan Next explore the available options and develop a system for assigning them each a score for urgency, cost, and complexity of implementation to help crystalize your feasibility decisions. With your score sheet in hand, develop a master plan that includes not only the lower-level automation but also considers the upper-level systems that will properly manage the automation and ways to integrate the new procedures with existing Enterprise Resource Planning systems and systems for Factory Control. The exact order matters less than ensuring your automation is built to minimize future modifications that could add unexpected costs and complexity. 3. Focus on major wins Once the master plan and control structure is complete, your next step is to focus on major wins, which can include reduced labor, increased overall equipment effectiveness, and better control of processes. Areas that require more complicated solutions or carry higher risk should be prioritized by the organization’s preferences. Identifying the right people and resource teams to lead these challenges is critical as well. Custom solutions adapt to your existing processes, while off-the-shelf solutions may require you to adapt your processes to fit the software. Carefully evaluate both approaches to find the right balance for your team and establish clear metrics to measure success. 4. Manage risk and timing Next, remember that downstream impacts such as packaging and product type limitations could impact other parts of the operation. This is the time to do a comprehensive risk assessment at the various stages to ensure all stakeholders can understand and prepare for the expected or unexpected consequences of the automation efforts. The time it will take to implement automation is another important factor. Time can be difficult to outline in the early analysis, but the potential impacts of time on cost and operation could either propel your choice or be prohibitive to implementation. It’s therefore important to align automation projects carefully within the broader organizational roadmap. For example, if a product cycle is shorter than the actual implementation timeline to create it, the automation would be a wasted effort or even a negative cost. Be sure evaluate these issues in the planning stage. 5. Build the right team and culture Choosing the right partners and identifying key internal resources and stakeholders is the final step to help you mitigate complexity and risk. While you may be able to address many challenges independently, challenges involving multiple systems or departments will require focus on determining the ideal partners, team, and leadership to ensure they succeed. Final thoughts Adding the up-front time to accomplish these five steps well has its own implications, of course. But ensuring these five steps occur early is the ideal way to ensure smooth and cohesive automation that sets up everyone involved for success. In our experience at Chang Robotics, we help organizations of all sizes work through each of these steps. In doing this, we can attest that smart automation is less about the rush to install technology and much more about creating a roadmap that balances feasibility, cost, risk, and long-term strategy. In your own process look for the partners who can support you at every stage of the journey from feasibility to implementation to measurement and reporting to ensure that whatever you automate will create real and sustainable value for your customers, your employees, and your business results.
