How to Become a Manufacturing Cell Fully-Automated Without Robots: Case-Study in the Automotive Components Industry

Abstract

final components or subassemblies suppliers (Tier 1, 2 and 3), distributors, retailers and customers. The OEM’s are constantly looking for suppliers to whom they can delegate responsibilities in areas such development, sourcing and planning, and this constant search induces pressures in the suppliers to lower prices and make deliveries within the stipulated deadlines, without compromising the products quality assurance. Indeed, quality and delivery time are indicators that highly affect the evaluation of the preferred product supplier [7,9]. In the specific case of the car seat, the evolution from mass to a personalized production, according to customer needs can also be applied. Following the evolution of automobile production, the seat was traditionally produced as an integral part of the automobile, where the available possible configurations were Abstract Productivity is a key factor for companies manufacturing parts and sets to the automotive industry. Automation plays an important role in this matter, allowing development of entire manufacturing cells without the direct need of workers. Even in countries where the labour cost is relatively low, it becomes necessary to improve the level of automation applied to manufacture cells and reduce the dependence of the human labour unpredictability, also increasing the quality and reducing the costs. This case study was developed based on an industrial request in order to improve a semi-automatic cell devoted to seat suspension mat manufacturing. The original cell allows several automatic operations but it needs two workers for two specific operations not considered in the initial design. Thus, new concepts of wire feeding and manipulation were developed in order to allow a better material flow throughout the cell. The new cell was designed and built with success, allowing obtain a fully-automated system, which leads to a better productivity and reliability of the manufacturing process.