Businesses across the spectrum of industry and size face a unifying challenge with staffing and supply chain issues.  We all seem to be facing a multitude of challenges:  fast-approaching deadlines, identifying and correcting design flaws, and increasing product deliverables, all while staying technologically current and adaptable to an ever-changing landscape.

We have turned our engineering talents inward by implementing manufacturing process automation and enhancements.   Below are some examples of how process refinement at ADC increases our throughput and decreases our production times.

• Customized ADC robots using our in-house 3D printers to manufacture custom arm components to pick, de-gate, sort, stack, and box plastic injection molded parts.

• We programmed and modified a robot to install inserts during the molding process and to install inserts during post-production.

• Custom-designed 3D printed components to enable automation on any machine and process.

• Developed simple, yet impactful, bench-based trimming fixtures offering semi-manual process improvement to fully automated resin through fully-boxed parts that are ready to ship  (of course, quality measures are in place for all manufacturing runs).

How do we increase production with our current staff? 

With automation, our staff is freed up to move on to the next machine setup.  Each machine can run more independently of human intervention. In other words, one staff person isn’t tied to one machine all day.

” We found our staff would work faster than the manufacturing process – they would handle the trimming or insert and then have to wait for the machine to produce the next part. The addition of machine-based automation frees our staff to work on more technical and quality-related tasks while the robots work on repetitive tasks.”    – Jim Marschalek, VP of Engineering.

As a supplier, it is helping us to meet our customer demands. We are internally taking our challenges and refining them with outside-the-box solutions.  What we are learning and implementing here at ADC just might be a solution for your business challenges.