Anil Chaudhry, head, robotics & solutions, industrial automation business unit, Delta Electronics India, on robotics in manufacturing
With increasing adoption of automation, what advice do you have for customers to take advantage of robotics and automation?
With the growing demand from customer and consumer, automation will pass through the stage of digital evolution, driven by consumer expectations. Our customer’s need is to respond to these expectations innovatively, through the use of artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation. Robotic process automation (RPA) – which uses robots to carry out standardised tasks – is now mature enough to be easily and cheaply adopted. The technology also requires only limited configuration and management. It has shown very positive trends in market and users are confident to adopt standard robots to perform these tasks across the industries. RPA can produce many benefits, including significant cost savings, faster processing, and — most importantly, perhaps — more satisfied customers and employees. By introducing RPA, people can be placed into new mixes of tasks that play to their human strengths. I’m not afraid of stating that ‘robots are creating better jobs in industry’. Just imagine an operator handling a forged part which is heated to 12000 centigrade. CIOs must recognise the cost and time efficiencies of any automation system. A CIO’s time is precious and manually repeating operations is a waste of time.
Brief us on some of the modular, highly configurable automation solutions you develop that will allow manufacturers to cut down engineering time and operating costs, across various verticals.
Our methodologies of offering an automation solution to our customers are based on the concept ‘easy to use’. While adopting this concept, we are looking one layer down and configuring our solutions while keeping in mind the end user, who is the operator using our automation. Flexibility, modularity, standardisation and user interface are key attributes we follow to keep our engineering solution best suited to industrial use. By using our standard softwares, we configure our solution in the virtual world and accordingly go for manufacturing to reduce manufacturing and implementation time. The software development team follows a modular programming structure, so multiple manufacturing cells having the same or similar programme to save on engineering time.
With changing expectations and market fluctuations, how are you looking at offering better and newer solutions?
Our solutions are flexible and modular in design. We always keep in mind the future dynamics while configuring a solution. Our solutions are based on standard parts and are built on standard modules. Reconfiguring a solution is easy and can be implemented at the customer end. Delta Application Integrated Robots bring high level of flexibility along with a smart reconfigurable manufacturing system.
What are the kinds of services you offer in predictive and preventive maintenance?
Delta Remote Monitoring Service is the solution to address customer needs to monitor the system remotely, which can predict the health of the system and demands of preventive maintenance in the coming future. This helps in managing and reducing the site downtime and OPEX of the operator drastically. It also helps to maintain high uptime at the lowest cost. We offer an annual maintenance contract to our customers, and with this offering, we support our customers to keep our automation up and healthy.