High Performance Automation – The Key To Long Term Survival

Finding A Formula For Successful Adaptation

Steve Jobs pushed his engineers to “stuff” the Macintosh operating system inside tiny handheld boxes and in the process created smartphones, pushing the microelectronics revolution to the next level and igniting a social and political revolution that is remaking the world.

Nearly everyone has heard of the Titanic and the obvious lessons involved: getting technology wrong, failing to adapt to changing conditions, or misunderstanding radical changes happening in your environment will put you in the shoes of Wang, Kodak and Nokia who paid a heavy price for keeping their heads in the sand.

Pioneers In Industrial Automation

Fanuc, Ltd., a company that should be as well known as Microsoft or Apple, but isn’t, is one of the largest makers of industrial robots in the world, without which many multi-nationals would be shadows of their current selves.

Fanuc Ltd. and GE Fanuc, renamed GE Intelligent Platforms after the split in 2009, both followed the formula of successful adaptation through absorption of as much knowledge as possible from external sources, including machine tool companies, customers and companies providing similar technologies.

High Performance Automation Of Factories

From the early days in the 1950’s when Fanuc, Ltd. began developing numerical controls (NCs) and servo mechanisms, the company’s management was heavily involved in research and development (R&D) and they continue on this path today.

What has changed recently is old analog controls have been replaced by digital controls making them much faster with much shorter response times. For example, if one were running identical machines with identical parts, programs and control sets with identical rapid feed rates, starting from the same distance, cycle time for the operation of an analog control machine would be 4.5 seconds. A digital controlled machine, a Fanuc 18i for example, would be just 2.8 seconds. This difference is related to the processing and response time of the control and the digital drives and the signals between them.

Running different controls: Mazak, Siemens, Fanuc, Okuma, etc., requires operators to think quickly and often, relying on manuals and troubleshooting guides. No wonder people get overwhelmed and bogged down with all the alternatives: but this shouldn’t keep a company from moving up the technology food chain.

Trends in PLC systems is another example: as these systems became PC-based, some of the first systems ran on 8086 microprocessors, CMOS memory and limited capability. Then came systems with “magnetic bubble memory,” then 32-bit processors and finally 64-bit processors.

Successfully Achieving Integration

In the end it is the companies which can achieve full technological integration that will be most successful and have the greatest chance of surviving in an increasingly competitive world.

Technological trouble starts when there are holes in internal knowledge and a failure of people inside the organization to adapt key technology that is the life blood of future success.

Tags: Fanuc, ge fanuc, integration, Ltd.

This entry was posted on May 14th, 2014 and is filed under Automation, GE Fanuc. Both comments and pings are currently closed.