A bar feeder loading material into a lathe might fail to trip a switch properly only on rare occasions. Any process on any CNC machine might be susceptible to eight to 10 infrequent production-stopping problems, all of which had to be discovered and resolved before the process could be trusted to run with no employee present.Īgain, these were not big problems. Hogge says, because successfully resolving a problem that halted production one night could simply reveal another problem that would halt the same process on a later night. The way through this journey was often infuriating, Mr. In the next post in this series, we’ll dive further into how lights-out manufacturing is being applied to the oil and gas industry, and how you can implement the ‘lights-out’ methodology in your own organization.That is, it was a journey of fixing previously tiny problems that became large, and previously invisible problems that became visible, once the machines started to run with no operators present. As it stands, the choice is becoming resoundingly clear: help facilitate the inevitable, gaining an edge over the competition and favor with higher-ups in your industry, or sit idly by and watch the train pull out of the station, potentially with your job in tow. If the process is well-defined and repetitive then it has the potential to be automated, and it is already being incrementally deployed across every sector. Nonetheless, whether you’re afraid of it or thrilled by it, lights-out manufacturing isn’t going away. What we lack in physical robustness, we make up for in ingenuity it’s what has gotten us this far, and it’s what will take us into the next chapter. By constructing a new stage over the old one, we have an opportunity to climb up onto it and build atop, much like people have done in the years following every industrial revolution to date (this one will be the fourth, in case you lost count). To some, this may seem like the first signs of the robot coup to usurp all the jobs from mankind, but many others see this as an opportunity to flourish. This, in turn, allows us to get back to doing what humans do best: coming up with new ideas and solving problems in creative ways that machines are unable to grasp. By strategically swapping in machines at the most danger-prone areas of the production chain, production companies are able to decrease the number of worksite injuries, and by proxy allow humans to get out of the danger zone. Heavy equipment failures, well blowouts, truck and vehicle accidents, or even simply slipping and falling are all potential hazards on the job. That same year, more than 65 people died at oil and gas industry worksites, a 60 percent increase in on-the-job fatalities from the previous year. The Houston Chronicle found that in a single year, 79 workers lost limbs, 82 were crushed, 92 suffered burns, and 675 broke bones in oil industry work accidents. The Upstream O&G sector, for instance, is wrought with safety concerns, reporting numerous and often gruesome oilfield wellsite injuries every year. Industries across the map are waking up to the potential of lights-out manufacturing, and they have more in mind than just decreased labor costs. Machines work tirelessly to mass-produce automobiles at the Fanuc headquarters just outside Tokyo, JapanĪs our technological capability grows, so does our collective imagination for its possible use cases. Even Elon Musk has spent the last few years publicly hyping his ‘Alien Dreadnought’ factory, which would ostensibly produce cars at ‘post-human’ speeds as soon as Summer 2018 (although, considering that deadline is here, he has recently acquiesced to being somewhat overly-optimistic in those projections). Meanwhile, the Fanuc Corporation in Japan is employing large fleets of robots and a handful of experts to fulfill a myriad of end-to-end manufacturinin Japan is employing large fleets of robots and a handful of experts to fulfill a myriad of end-to-end manufacturing processes, such as automobile assembly and painting, pharmaceutical sorting and packaging, and food preparation. In the Netherlands, Philips is using lights-out manufacturing to produce electric razors with a team of 128 robots and just nine human quality assurance workers. Today, while truly autonomous factories (those that are capable of running indefinitely without human maintenance) are still a few years off from reality, some of the current iterations are remarkably close. The concept has been noted in publication since 1955 when the short story ‘Autofac’ described a system of self-replicating machines. The methodology behind these windowless factory walls is called ‘lights-out’ manufacturing wherein mass-produced goods are assembled autonomously by an intricate system of intelligent machines with little-to-no human intervention.
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