rapidFOX
Sustainability
Company
Get in touch
There is a kind of installation you regularly find in plants: correctly specified, cleanly installed, properly documented – and parked in a corner. It was too slow. That is not an operating error but a specification error.
No operator refuses a lifting aid on principle. They refuse it when it costs them time they do not have in the cycle. At a target time of ninety seconds a part, ten seconds of extra handling is more than ten per cent – and nobody makes that up elsewhere. The device then gets used exactly as long as somebody is watching. After that it stands.
Almost never in the lift. A balancer lifts fifty kilograms by a metre in two seconds; that is faster than any manual work. Time is lost before and after: applying the gripper, regripping from control handle to part, waiting for vacuum to build, returning to the home position. Those four points are the adjusting screws – and all four can be solved by design.
Below about twenty kilograms manual work is fast – any device is a detour, and acceptance comes only from the strain saved, not from time. Between twenty and forty kilograms a good device is already as fast or faster than two hands. Above that it wins clearly, because manual work happens in pairs or with setting down and regripping. Knowing that line helps when justifying a project.
Before any specification we take a time – not of the lift but of the whole operation, from releasing the previous part to releasing the next. That figure is the only one a design can be checked against. It regularly shows that half the time goes on something never mentioned in conversation: finding the fixture, turning the part, walking around a pallet.
A control element reachable with the hand on the part saves two to three seconds per operation over one that requires regripping. At two hundred operations that is ten minutes a shift. So the question of where the operator hands are in every phase belongs in the design – not in the instructions.
| Phase | Typical by hand | With a good device |
|---|---|---|
| Picking up | 2 s | 2 to 4 s |
| Lifting and guiding | 4 to 8 s | 3 to 5 s |
| Aligning and placing | 5 to 15 s | 2 to 4 s |
| Releasing and returning | 1 s | 2 to 3 s |
| From 40 kg: second person | always | not needed |
Listen, then measure. In the vast majority of cases the refusal rests on a concrete experience: an earlier device was slow, in the way or unreliable. Taking the time study together with the operators and solving the four time sinks by design usually earns acceptance by itself.
From about twenty kilograms yes, and above forty clearly. The reason is not lifting speed but that aligning and placing succeed more accurately with a guided device and without regripping – and that no second person has to be fetched.
Half a day for one workstation. We record twenty to thirty operations to see spread and outliers, and talk to the operators about where it snags. The result is the basis for both the specification and the economic calculation.
Then we say so. There are workstations where the time does not permit hand-guided technology – there the honest answer is automation or a change to the sequence, not a device that stands still afterwards.
Weightless handling – floating instead of lifting.
View deviceThe jointed arm for millimetre-precise handling.
View deviceThe whole area covered – in X and Y.
View deviceThere is no limit value. There is a duty to assess.
Read the articleThe second person is the most expensive line in the calculation.
Read the articleThe question is never “which unit?”. It is “which movement?”.
Read the articleManaging Director, Entracon Planungsgesellschaft mbH
Engineer with a doctorate, specialising in plant engineering, digital design and process automation – from simulation through to commissioning.
A short conversation usually settles more than three quotations. You reach an engineer directly, not a queue.
Start typing – for example “balancer”, “SAP” or “pipe stress”.
Reach Entracon
How can we help?
Thank you.
