How AMRs Support Lean Manufacturing

The idea behind Lean Manufacturing is not a novel one. Since its early development in the 1940s when Taiichi Ohno developed the Toyota Production System, through the 1980s and 1990s when it took its place as the Management Philosophy of the modern factory, Lean Manufacturing has been a driving force in how we manage our companies. Today, the philosophy of continuously improving has seeped well beyond the factory floor and into our everyday culture. We’ve learned to look for small improvements that help us work smarter, live better and make progress toward our goals. Seeking out small wins and better ways to do things has given us meaningful gains not only in our personal lives, but also as companies look to scale in scrappy economic environments.

So what role do Autonomous Mobile Robots play as new tools in an established theory? 

Game Recognizes Game

Working with companies in the manufacturing space, Seegrid has spent years engaging customers around how their environments and businesses function. Engineers and plant managers spend time discussing the challenges of how material flows through a plant. Together, they establish and arrange processes and mechanisms into workflows. From there, movement can be standardized to create a safer, more efficient working environment.

Having a front row seat to helping facilities solve pain points in production, Seegrid practices what they preach. At Seegrid headquarters in Pittsburgh, PA, manufacturing and supply chain teams collaborate and challenge themselves to reduce waste in applications across the entire business, rejecting the stagnant thought of “that’s the way it’s always been done.” Seegrid’s lean philosophy is to get a little better every day, and through those incremental improvements, big changes happen. Whether through a packaging design change that saves 40 hours a year, or a workstation redesign that allows them to build one more autonomous mobile robot each week, continuous improvement is the name of the game.

The process evaluations and problem solving that continue to help their customers achieve their goals have also helped Seegrid improve its own processes and products. This understanding enables deeper and more meaningful conversations with customers at all levels of the organization. When you speak the same language, relationships become closer and solutions become easier to develop and implement.

Waste Not, Want Not.

Because Lean Manufacturing plays an important role in manufacturing operations and in the relationships Seegrid builds with its customers, we return to the question: What role do Autonomous Mobile Robots play as new tools in an established theory?

One place AMRs plug right into this equation is through the eight wastes of Lean Manufacturing, often referred to by the acronym TIMWOODS:

Transportation

Inventory

Motion

Waiting

Over-Production

Over-Processing

Defects 

Skills 

These wastes can show up as cracks in operational processes in a myriad of ways—from the way a technician reaches for a tool to the way boxes are hauled across a factory floor. This is where AMRs can play a powerful role in reducing waste once a team recognizes where inefficiencies exist.

Transportation

Traditional Lean practices often reduce transportation waste by bringing processes closer together. Once an operation has eliminated all of the extra material movement that it reasonably can, AMRs further improve the operation by making necessary transportation more predictable and repeatable. Industrial autonomous vehicles perform those routes consistently, helping teams reduce unnecessary handling, while creating a more reliable material flow.

Inventory

If material consumption and delivery can be unpredictable, keeping safety stock nearby can protect production from shortages. However, that buffer space also requires capital, handling, and management. AMRs create dependable material movement needed to get the right material to the right place at the right time. This kind of predictability reduces the need for excess WIP inventory.

Motion

Lean makes a distinction between transportation and motion. Transportation is the unnecessary movement of material. Motion is the unnecessary movement of people or equipment while completing the work.

An employee walking across a workcell several times to retrieve a tool is motion waste. Combined with intelligent workcell design, AMRs reduce the driving and retrieval work required of employees. Material is delivered where it is needed, when it is needed. This allows teams to design workspaces around the work that creates value, rather than around the movement that is required to support it.

Waiting

When dependent processes fall out of sync, the resulting bottleneck can affect everything downstream. To counter this, AMRs can be scheduled around production needs. Combined with fleet management and analytics tools, AMR operations can generate data that helps teams identify recurring delays, bottlenecks, and inconsistencies. This visibility helps teams improve the process rather than simply react to the symptoms.

Over Production

Producing more than what is needed can create additional inventory and material handling headaches. Reliable material flow helps manufacturers better align production with actual demand. Automation can become the metronome production teams use to follow schedules and pull systems they have established. This makes it easier to support just-in-time processes without creating large buffers to solve for inconsistent material delivery.

Over Processing

Repeatability is key to producing a uniform product. Deviation from the optimized workflow is a recipe for creating over-processing waste. Once a process has been established, it needs to be followed. Automation helps ensure that material movements follow the defined process, shift after shift, without adding new waste. Seegrid AMRs are flexible solutions that evolve with your operations and can easily adapt, providing consistent workflows as your operations scale.

Defects

Materials and finished goods can be damaged while moving through a facility, whether from abrupt stops, collisions, or improper handling. For manufacturers focused on reducing defects, having standardized movement on the floor can help protect product quality throughout the process. AMRs are reliable tools in this regard because they follow certain operating parameters, minimizing handling errors and the risk of product damage associated with manual material transport.

Skills

Lean calls on organizations to ensure their people are spending time where their skills create the most value. An experienced operator transporting material repeatedly between two predictable locations is not the best use of that employee’s time or experience. Automating repetitive material movement enables employees to spend more time on value-add work that requires critical knowledge and judgment.

Established Theory, New Tools? 

There is an important reason Lean and autonomous solutions work well together: both benefit from understanding the process before trying to improve it.

The goal is not to automate every movement simply because it can be automated, but rather to ask better questions. 

For Seegrid, those questions are being asked on both sides of the equation: inside their Pittsburgh facility where the autonomous fork lifts and tow tractors are built, and alongside the manufacturing facilities using those vehicles to rethink the movement of material within their operations.

AMRs give manufacturers another way to put Lean principles into motion. By turning well-understood, repeatable processes into consistent material flow, they reduce the waste that stands between where an operation is today—and where it wants to go.