Any detailed investigation into the design of a product results in a
more productive method of assembly. The parts and assembly operations
used to put together the parts can be viewed with either manual or
automatic assembly in mind. When designing for automatic
assembly, remember that the intricate feedback loop that co-ordinates
human motors is not present in economically justifiable automatic
assembly systems. For example, parts that are manually picked up the
wrong way round can have their orientation corrected. The human
assembly worker detects this error through sight or touch and quickly
corrects the orientation. Similarly, defective parts
can be detected and discarded by a human assembly worker.
Automatic workheads do not detect rejects without the aid of complex
sensor systems. A defective part arriving at the workhead causes
a jam and the workstation is down for a period of time. These events
are minimized by having high component quality levels and
restructuring the inspection routines. Most manual assembly systems
have three inspection stages - goods inward, during assembly, and upon
final assembly of the product. Parts or assemblies which do not
fall within quality bands, at each of these stages, are rejected.
Automatic assembly equipment requires higher quality components and,
therefore, greater quality control is required at the goods inward
stage than for manual assembly. Automatic assembly equipment, fed with
high quality parts, gives a higher quality finished product than manual
assembly. The consistency of an automatic system, aided by high
quality parts creates a high quality product.
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