A Raymond GmbH & Co.KG designs its production flexibly
Summary
The A Raymond network is an international company network of the automotive supply industry in the business field of fastening technology. Founded in 1865 in Grenoble (France) by Albert-Pierre Raymond, the company is still family-owned and supplies all well-known international automotive manufacturers.
The future-oriented company wants to make existing processes more flexible and automate manual work in order to be able to cover new production and assembly areas in the medium and long term. Another goal of the conversion is to create a more attractive working environment for employees, in which monotonous tasks are automated and the workforce can be entrusted with higher-value work.
For the planning and achievement of the goals of their project, the company relied on the Advanced Robotic Workstation robot platform from ESSERT Robotics and the many years of experience of the system integrator. Together, all requirements were solved holistically and the robot automation was put into operation.
“With the platform solution from ESSERT, we are very flexible and can also integrate different processes retrospectively to cover a wide variety of areas. This enables us to react quickly to new customer requirements,” says Mathias Hänsel, technologist at A Raymond GmbH & Co.KG.
“With the platform solution from ESSERT, we are very flexible and can also integrate different processes retrospectively to cover a wide variety of areas. This enables us to react quickly to new customer requirements.”
Mathias Hänsel, technologist at A Raymond GmbH & Co.KG
The challenge
The monotonous, repetitive tasks on the various production machines were to be automated in order to assign more interesting and valuable tasks to workers and to be able to cover new production and assembly areas in the future. A flexible, expandable and reconfigurable solution was sought.
“For some time now, we have had the goal of automating as much as possible around our production machines. One of the main challenges for us was the perfect interaction between our existing devices and the new automation solution. The necessary fine positioning of the workpieces in the individual nests and the safeguarding of the various process steps were also difficult hurdles.
Mathias Hänsel, technologist at A Raymond GmbH & Co.KG.
A Raymond GmbH robot workstation Since we had in mind a flexibly usable “robot cell” for the planned automation solution from the very beginning, we quickly found what we were looking for after doing some research and contacted ESSERT.
It is ideal for us that the workstation can be positioned very quickly on different machines. After the automatic calibration, the precision to the fixtures is absolutely reliably established and we can work in a process-safe manner.”
A wide variety of fixtures can be programmed in the workstation as a recipe and called up accordingly. This allows A Raymond to meet the challenge for more flexibility in production.
The current status
The automation solution is not only convincing in its flexibility, but also in its use of state-of-the-art technologies and its high modularity.
“We are more than satisfied with the result! Our goal is to use the workstation on several machines and to connect the cells with each other. This will allow us to cover even more complex tasks and offer our customers an even broader process spectrum.”
Mathias Hänsel, technologist at A Raymond GmbH & Co.KG
With the automation solution, A Raymond is able to further advance its goals, make its employees’ jobs more attractive, and continue to respond to new customer demands in the future.
