Industrial Welding Robots Improve Your Profitability and Productivity

Accord­ing to Intra­do Globe­Newswire, the glob­al robot­ic weld­ing mar­ket size was val­ued at $5.5 mil­lion in 2018 and is pro­ject­ed to reach $10.5 mil­lion by 2026, grow­ing at a CAGR of 8.7% from 2019 to 2026. These num­bers are no acci­dent, as the mar­ket imple­ments Indus­try 4.0, man­u­fac­tur­ers will con­tin­ue to seek ways to improve oper­a­tions through automa­tion. With no short­age of robot­ic weld­ing equip­ment, the heavy invest­ment by var­i­ous indus­tries in robot­ics tech­nol­o­gy has encour­aged the fur­ther devel­op­ment of auto­mat­ed weld­ing.

Automa­tion is a long-term invest­ment, with cost sav­ings not seen in one lump sum, rather incre­men­tal­ly over the life­time of the robot. Improv­ing prof­itabil­i­ty starts with being able to cal­cu­late the return on invest­ment (ROI) of the auto­mat­ed sys­tem. Robots​.com has an ROI cal­cu­la­tor for busi­ness­es to work out their pay­back peri­od, the peri­od it will take for the invest­ment to break even. These cal­cu­la­tions estab­lish the expec­ta­tions of the prof­itabil­i­ty of a sys­tem with most com­pa­nies plan­ning to reach a return on invest­ment over a 2 – 3 year period. 

Once a return on invest­ment is achieved the sys­tem is now direct­ly improv­ing the prof­itabil­i­ty of a busi­ness through its effi­cien­cy, reli­a­bil­i­ty, and qual­i­ty con­trol. Indus­tri­al weld­ing robots are faster when com­pared to man­u­al process­es. Typ­i­cal­ly the indus­try cal­cu­lates that a robot­ic welder is equiv­a­lent to 3.5 man­u­al welders in terms of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. This equates to an 85% increase in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty for a busi­ness when using an auto­mat­ed system. 

This increase is fur­ther com­pound­ed when con­sid­er­ing the effect the auto­mat­ed sys­tem has on the over­all qual­i­ty of the weld too. While being faster than man­u­al coun­ter­parts, robot­ic sys­tems can also guar­an­tee the qual­i­ty of the weld every time, nev­er mak­ing errors and always result­ing in a smooth, clean result. In a man­u­al work­shop, an oper­a­tor may make many errors, often opt­ing to hide the mis­take by going over it again with the torch. While this alone is incred­i­bly inef­fi­cient in terms of time, it’s also waste­ful of resources and can hide a pos­si­bly flawed weld. Because an auto­mat­ed weld sys­tem will pro­duce the cor­rect result on the first try, robot­ic sys­tems will save man­u­fac­tur­ers mon­ey in resources and in qual­i­ty con­trol errors – direct­ly affect­ing the prof­itabil­i­ty of the bot­tom line. 

Anoth­er impor­tant aspect affect­ing the prof­itabil­i­ty and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of weld­ing is the time spent on weld­ing itself. Stud­ies have shown that for man­u­al welders, only 30 to 40 per­cent of the time is spent weld­ing. Oth­er tasks involved in the weld­ing process such as han­dling, clean­ing, heat­ing, and cool­ing take up almost 60 to 70 per­cent of the operator’s time. Robot­ic weld­ing sys­tems, on the oth­er hand, require min­i­mal down­time for things like clean­ing and heat­ing or cool­ing. This allows the weld­ing robot to spend most of its time in the pro­duc­tion phase. 

The adop­tion of weld­ing robots ensures increased pro­duc­tiv­i­ty on weld­ing lines. Auto­mat­ed sys­tems also reduce inten­sive labor injuries, improve order ful­fill­ment speed & accu­ra­cy, and increased uptime with reduced costs. This tech­nol­o­gy also enhances the effi­cient use of work­ing space and improves the sup­ply chain per­for­mance in end-user indus­tries, over­all improv­ing the prof­itabil­i­ty and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of the busi­ness­es smart enough to imple­ment the technology.