Horizon has launched its own brand of robots at its Smart Factory even in Japan, where it created a lights out production unit with extensive use of robots to load pallets and move work from one area to another.
This is an advance on the demonstration two years ago at the same event where robots made their first mainstream appearance for the company. Then it used robot arms to load pallets of to feed book blocks into a perfect binder. This year it introduced a workflow for a robot dominated production flow.
Now the Japanese company has developed its own AMR robot to move work around a factory under the guidance of its Warehouse Control System. “Horizon have decided to build their own AMR so that the engineers can make a better integration to the control software,” says IFS UK technical sales director Jason Seaber.
The company will continue to work with third-party suppliers of robot arms for palletising jobs, with integration to Horizon’s software and under a Horizon badge.
”The Warehouse Control System is Horizon’s software solution for controlling the movement of the AMR robots,” says Seaber. The software ensures that the robot arrives at the right place at the right time to pick up a pallet of finished work and more importantly to bring work in progress to the next device in the production chain ‘just in time’.
The idea is to ensure that the operator does not leave the folder, the laminator to any other position to go in search of the next job. The iCE Link software is able to identify the next job and to adjust settings of the equipment, but that advantage can be lost if someone has to leave the machine to fetch a pallet of work.
The concept has prevailed on presses where printers have long recognised the importance of having plates for the next job or section in position in the plate changing unit ahead of the job changeover and to ensure that the paper for the next job is ready. As the press is the most expensive investment in the plant, the imperative is to ensure that running time is not lost waiting for plates and more.
This is now applied to finishing through the Warehouse Control System. As a pallet is close to being filled, a signal is sent to the WCS which in turn sends the AMR to that position to pick up the work. The job file will provide information about the destination, whether to a binding line, to a buffer storage area or to a longer term storage in the physical warehouse. The pallet position is logged at all points.
The gain comes from a boost to productivity by removing the waste in terms of time that is associated with every job. For the majority of printers this means that the greater the number of jobs, the more time is lost vis-a-vis running time. Exactly where that gain is made will vary. Seaber explains: “We go to audit the customer to identify where their bottlenecks are as this is where we will focus first. This means that there are benefits to improving productivity at the start of the journey with robots.”
