Seegrid Robots Shape Material Movement Future at Hearth & Home Technologies
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216 RIDC Park West Drive Pittsburgh, PA 15275 877.SEEGRID www.seegrid.com |
Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) have served as an efficient way to move materials around manufacturing facilities, distribution centers and warehouses. While vehicles guided by lasers or magnetic tape create labor savings and boost productivity, making moves, adds and changes to routes can be time consuming and expensive. A new category of vision-guided Industrial Mobile Robots such as those offered by Seegrid Corporation are shaping the future of material handling by providing tremendous cost savings, flexibility and productivity boosts. The Seegrid robots are affordable, easy to implement and operate, integrate into existing workflows and can accommodate new routes in hours not days or weeks. Hearth & Home Technologies recently learned how Seegrid can help boost productivity with people, processes and robots.
As the world's leading producer and installer of hearth products, Hearth & Home Technologies wanted to improve quality and gain efficiencies, and sought to reduce travel time and costs associated with the delivery of parts to its manufacturing assembly locations. The company’s internal suppliers are responsible for delivering parts to the assembly line in various frequencies throughout the day. The improvement goal was to reduce unnecessary travel and implement labor savings with its suppliers.
The company’s Lake City facility had been using manual tuggers as well as Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) with magnetic tape to move carts of material to the production line. This older generation of AGVs was not always reliable, was costly to maintain, and didn’t provide the flexibility to easily adapt to route changes. Hearth & Home was looking for a more efficient parts delivery method.
The company looked at newer AGVs on the market but didn’t want the wire guides, magnets and lasers that come with them. Hearth & Home needed flexibility to change the routes cost effectively, easily and quickly and discovered Seegrid’s robotic tugger could solve the company’s challenges. After a brief “test drive” and simple operator training, the robot was ready for its work of parts delivery.
“The Seegrid robot gives us much more flexibility and is much easier to use and maintain than our other AGVs,” explained David Richmond, Continuous Improvement Manager – Lake City, Hearth & Home Technologies. “We can accommodate product flow changes basically on the fly—with the Seegrid robot we can add or change a route in about an hour versus days. Because it’s simple to manage, our production operators can do their own troubleshooting, helping to reduce our service and maintenance costs. It’s just much more hands on.”
Richmond added that Seegrid has almost instantly provided both hard and soft benefits to the Lake City facility. The Seegrid robots ROI are future proof that Hearth & Home will look at replacing its older AGVs with Seegrid’s next generation technology.
First, Hearth & Home has realized productivity gains and labor savings. The company was able to redeploy members to other areas where they can provide a greater impact to production and value-added activities. Members embrace the new technology because it is safer, more reliable and easier to operate and maintain than manual tuggers and AGVs. Productivity has increased because the robot allows internal suppliers to deliver smaller quantities of material to the line more frequently if needed.
Seegrid robots also provide Hearth & Home with greater flexibility. Members can better accommodate product flow changes by quickly adding a new route or changing an existing route in a matter of an hour. Operators can be trained quickly to use the robot and can perform basic troubleshooting, greatly reducing costly downtime.
The Hearth & Home implementation is another great example where Seegrid’s Industrial Mobile Robots provide operating cost savings from day one of installation and every day thereafter.
