“You truly understood our pain points and the production process. This built our knowledge base to further automate and to grow our business,” said Ryan.
Company: Tapecon is a 100-year-old company that provides custom converting, printing and advanced manufacturing services for OEM medical, electronic and industrial applications.
Ryan Cribbin and Phil Przybyla from Tapecon attending a training class at Buffalo Manufacturing Works
Challenge:Tapecon’s Ryandra Line, which manufactures cohesive tape, is one of its highest-volume lines. The packaging on that line is a manual process with ergonomic and safety issues within the work cell. Prior to this project, the rolls of tape were manually unloaded from the machine and walked over to a staging area. At the staging area, labels had to be printed and applied to bags and then the tape rolls were handloaded into the bags and sealed. After sealing, the product was transported to a secondary staging area where the bagged tape rolls were bagged again and placed in boxes for shipment. Sometimes, the heat sealer would actuate in the area where manual handling occurred, causing a safety issue. Additionally, the product was exposed to debris, dust, and oils due to the manual processing. This process had a high cost of labor to pack and label and was a monotonous job that no one really enjoyed doing.
Solution: To find a tailored advanced manufacturing solution, the Shift 2.0 team from Buffalo Manufacturing Works visited Tapecon to perform a Technology Implementation Assessment and identify a range of “quick win” technology opportunities for the manufacturer to consider. Due to the ergonomic and safety issues, as well as the high labor costs on the Ryandra line, Tapecon selected a collaborative robot tending solution from the list of recommendations that would automatically pull processed tape rolls off the output station and move them through the packaging process.
Impact: Now that the automation system has been implemented, the total cycle time for packaging has been reduced. The robot is able to asynchronously process the previous batch of parts while the next batch of parts are being run allowing the total cycle time to be reduced. The automation equipment automatically bags and labels the product in multiple locations, which increases traceability and compliance. Furthermore, product quality has improved, and jeopardy risk has been reduced. Ryan Cribbin, Tapecon’s Continuous Improvement Lead, states that he is “getting a lot of good feedback from his team about not spending as much time in that cell doing monotonous packing, and that they are now able to go to more value-added work centers and perform higher level functions in their job”.
As a testament to the trainings that took place at both Buffalo Manufacturing Works and onsite at Tapecon, Ryan says that the team has a deeper understanding of the robot cell and how they can tailor it to their specific operations, and it also will allow them to keep improving over time. The Shift 2.0 program has “allowed us to open our minds up a lot more to the possibilities of how we can use it. We can make seamless automation changes and make it more of a fine-tuned product”.
Ryan shared that he appreciates how the Shift 2.0 team “helped us source the right equipment and made sure we had all the right tools for the project. You truly understood our pain points and the production process. This built our knowledge base to further automate and to grow our business. We plan to keep advancing and building revenue.”
