Don’t Miss Out: 7 Opportunities for Injection Molding Automation
It is no secret that automated processes have been becoming increasingly more useful and beneficial to all different types of manufacturing. This includes the plastic manufacturing industry. Today let’s talk about injection molding automation and how it can be highly useful to your company, especially in the times of labor shortages.
Not only can injection molding automation increase your productivity, but it also can help create a more people-friendly environment in the workplace. While studies have proven that robotics can help companies grow, most people don’t know how to begin.
Automation and robotics open up so many opportunities for plastics manufacturers to grow their companies and become more efficient. Here’s our list of seven processes that may be overlooked, but are actually ideal for automation.
1. The Intake of Raw Materials
In the plastics manufacturing industry, a lot of materials come in different sized sacks stacked on pallets. While truck unloading would be a difficult process to automate, emptying these sacks into a central feeding system is the perfect job for a robot. Automating this process will make unloading raw materials more efficient, and will also help reduce risk of injury to employees during the process.
2. Tending to Machines
Machine tending is actually not overlooked: It’s a very common task that uses robotics, but many companies may wonder if automation is worth the investment. Despite all the reservations smaller companies might have, with the advancement of artificial intelligence and costs lowering, this task is ideal to start injection molding automation.
3. Removal of Excess Material and Deburring
The process of removing excess material after a molding is tedious and repetitive which makes it a good process to automate. After removing the parts from the mold, the same robot could be used for deburring, or you can use different robots to perform these tasks separately.
4. Assembly of Plastic Parts
The assembly process for plastics can involve joining parts or adding other components to the plastic parts, and is an easily automated process. Using robots for assembly operations can greatly increase the speed of production.
5. Inspection of Product
With the increased intelligence of robotic technology, an automated process of inspection has actually become more reliable than doing it manually. Using robots eliminates all possible factors that might affect the quality of an inspection: They can measure dimensions to a set standard and can detect and fix defects faster and more accurately than any human could during manual inspection.
6. Packaging and Palletizing Product
Robotics are a good solution to help speed up the process of packaging after the injection molding automation process is finished. Robots are able to place the product into primary packaging in a speedy and consistent manner, and then place them into secondary packaging so they are ready for shipping. Finally, they can palletize the finished packaged products for transportation.
7. Internal Logistics
This step follows the process of injection molding automation. Your plastic manufacturing company has the ability to use robotic vehicles called automated guided vehicles and autonomous mobile robots to transport the already packaged pallets throughout the facility. This could involve bringing pallets to a shipping dock to be loaded onto trucks or moving products from one packaging station to another. They can also transport pallets from intake to the raw materials station.
What’s Next for Your Company’s Injection Molding Automation?
Now that you know about the injection molding processes that would be ideal to automate, you might be wondering what comes next. If you want to automate but need a helping hand to lead you through the process, AMS is here for you. You can contact us or book a virtual meeting to learn more.
