Is our industry up to speed with new technology?

In the last couple of years a number of articles in the trade magazines Products Finishing,^1,2 and Robotics and Automation News³ have appeared emphasising the benefits to the surface finishing industry of adoption of appropriate robotics and advanced automation technology, artificial intelligence and other smart technology, as we enter a manufacturing world of Industry 4.0. A similar in-house article has been produced by the Metal Finishers Association of India (MFAI) on the need for its members to embrace these advances, and we can be sure the Chinese and other South-East Asian sectors are also moving in this direction.

Asia is the most active market for industrial robots, with a share of newly installed robots about two thirds of global supply – according to the latest report from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) operational stock for the region’s largest adopter of robots, China, was about 783,000 units in 2019 – up 21% over 2018. Japan ranked second with about 355,000 units – up 12%. India, which has doubled the number of industrial robots operating in its factories within five years, to accompany its impressive growth in manufacturing, now has about 26,300 – up 15%. Only about 21,700 industrial robots operated in factories across the UK in 2019 – up only 5%. Measured on a density of installed industrial robots the UK lags behind the world average with <100 per 10,000 employees, most competitor countries being well above this, with leader S. Korea weighing in at >700 per 10,000 employees.

What Industry 4.0 means

Smart manufacturing using new and advanced technologies, such as robotics, advanced automation, and artificial Intelligence (AI); smart factories that function with minimised human intervention; IoT manufacturing – manufacturing with the use of intelligent devices; integration of any or all of these technologies.

Industry 4.0 in surface finishing

Matthew Kirchner of PFOnline believes smart technology will be leveraged for Just in Time (JIT) and lean production by integrating the manufacturers’ management systems with those of surface finishers – thus ensuring timely instruction of finishing needs and, consequently, timely delivery of service.

Some of the changes – particularly for surface finishers – that Kirchner predicts¹ are:

Inter connectivity of almost all equipment along the supply and value chain; interconnected management and operating systems that ‘talk’ to one another; algorithms to trigger processes; automated adjustment of lead times; automated adjustments of temperatures, chemical concentration (dosimetry), voltage, feed rate and other parameters; automated inventory

Advanced automation and robotics give a number of gains in surface finishing

Automation enables handling of large production volumes; polishing and plating different types of metal becomes easier; decreased manual labour – saving time and money, even if one or two saved operator roles are replaced by higher wage technological ones – and robots work faster and for longer hours giving faster turnaround and higher output; improved consistency and uniformity leading to lower reject rates, all of which giving increased customer satisfaction.

With Industry 4.0, lead time is greatly reduced because of integration of customer and supplier systems.

This also means lower warehouse requirements, with parts moved around remotely without human intervention.

Industry 4.0 predicts an all round safer environment for an operator through less human interaction and involvement.

There are several pertinent questions which arise from the above for the UK finishing industry, in particular. Are we as far advanced in planning for the introduction of these new technologies as other sectors appear to be? Given that the finishing industry is not stand-alone but only exists as an enabling part of the manufacturing supply chain, is any perceived slowness in adoption of these technologies down to the low fraction of manufacturing in UK GDP (barely 10%). And, importantly, given the intimate link of surface finishing to manufacturing, are we likely to be looking at a disruption of the balance of in-house surface finishing shops to sub-contract companies? After all, the former have one customer, the manufacturing company in which they are embedded, meaning many of their operating systems are already integrated, and any capital expenditure in upgrading to new technology is likely to be covered by the parent company. This is a far cry from the situation facing sub-contract firms coming under pressure to upgrade due to a need by manufacturing customers to improve productivity by adopting new technology (with maybe a post-Brexit squeeze also being applied). The national average company size in our sub-contract finishing sector is only about 15 employees, with about half less than 10, and we have to wonder how many have the financial means and technological know-how to cope. It would seem there may well be a potential need for the industry’s education and training providers to be ready to help with the latter.