Now, this is getting interesting. Last week, Henrik Christiansen of Graphic Robotics set the foundation by defining the real meaning of productivity and efficiency in print production. This week, he’s taking us on a deep dive into the decision of whether to robotize or not—identifying the environments that are ripe for robots, and the effects different production cell equipment investments can have on your total capacity and profitability. This is great stuff. Enjoy. 

Henrik Christiansen: Horizon stated at drupa 2016: “Finishing first.” All professional robot developers agree with this statement, because to develop a truly effective robotic solution, one has to start with what they want to obtain at the end of the process. A professional approach for optimizing the total print production process consequently starts with the final finishing process, and working backwards, up through pre-press. If you were to start with the printing press, or perhaps even in the prepress division, and work forward, there might be some very unpleasant surprises at the end when you finally get to finishing, so this is not the right way of doing things, and will not produce the optimal result.

Even though nearly all machines are getting faster and more automated, a lot of machines in finishing still require operators for the feeding and emptying processes. As you can expect, the operator’s lifting capacity prevents the machine from producing with maximum speed, so the incentive to buy faster machines is limited. It is simply not possible to increase the operator’s productivity with more advanced machines. The only way to bypass this human lifting capacity constraint is to let the robots perform the heavy and unhealthy lifts in and out of the machines. Robots have basically no lifting capacity constraint, so the decision to use robots suddenly makes it profitable to invest in the fastest machines that will increase productivity dramatically.