Techman Thailand Factory owns multiple SMT and PCB production lines. In order to keep up with the demand, TM Robot was introduced to enhance productivity as well as production quality.
Industrial 4.0 and industrial automation have been 2 very popular terms within the manufacturing world over the past few years. Various automation solutions are also invented in order to help enterprises and factories achieving these goals. Techman Thailand, the factory of Quanta Storage Inc. which manufactures SSD and performs SMT production, decided to implement one of the most innovative solutions into their production line, the collaborative robot arm.
Pursuing Efficiency and Quality with Cobot Arm
For factory managers, the 2 indicators they concern about the most are probably production efficiency and production quality. Under the global highly competitive environment, factories must find a way to provide as many high-quality goods to the customer as possible within a limited time. In order to do so, the TM collaborative robot series caught Simon Lin’s eye, who is the plant director of TMT Factory.
“Here at TMT, we currently have 3 SMT production lines and 18 assembly lines to support the demand from Quanta Storage Inc. It requires large human power and effort to manage this scale of the production site. Our ultimate goal is to maximize both productivity and quality, that’s when we thought of TM Robot.” Says Simon Lin. “TM Robot’s vision function and image recognition technology make them capable of identifying objects, including their size, shape, and color. We can combine these functions with the AOI application and have the robot arms sorting out NG objects from the good ones, and further carries out path planning and pick-and-place operations. These are the main reasons why we want to implement TM Robots into our production.”
Maximizing the Benefits with Limited Implementation Cost
For enterprise directors or factory managers, a great automation solution not only needs to fit their needs but also needs to be easy to implement and operate. At TMT, over 30 TM Robots are implemented into the work stations, executing jobs like picking/placing objects, labeling, and doing optical inspections. With all these robots, the operators need to fully understand how to operate and control them.
“One thing we like about TM Robot is its operating software – TMflow. It really reduces a lot of time needed for training our operators. The software is very intuitive and logical, so our operators can learn it very quickly. Thus, it didn’t take much time for them to become familiar with editing tasks on the production line using these robots.” says the TMT Automation Dept. manager Harry Tsou. “One other feature, which we think is the greatest advantage of TM Robot, is its smart built-in vision function. The vision smart function is capable of identifying various objects. Combining with TMflow and hand-guided teaching function. We are able to implement the robots to our production line in a very short time.” According to Mr. Tsou, within 6 months after implementing the TM Robots, TMT has recouped 80% of the implementation cost.
TM Robots not only help to enhance the factory’s productivity and quality consistency, but it also allows factory managers to adjust the production line in a more flexible way and optimize the whole production. And among all benefits, human workers can work safely when being in the same space with these cobots. It’s definitely a win-win implementation for both factory managers and the workers.