Do you trust your procurement strategies to a vendor who ships on time some of the time? Do you trust your equipment’s performance to a product that meets industry standards some of the time? Do you trust overseeing your factory floor to an employee who follows safety protocols most of the time?
Like your supply chain partners, OEM vendors, and employees, your automation strategy’s strongest asset is its consistency, especially if your operations span multiple facilities. Explore why standardized industrial automation integration across all your plants is a necessity—and how to achieve it.
The Advantages of Standardized Automation
Manufacturing process automation is essential to meeting the high standards of the modern industrial customer and keeping your competitive edge sharp. However, you can’t truly make the most of automation in your factories if each factory has completely different automation processes. Having consistent, standardized, and interconnected process automation systems across multiple manufacturing locations allows for:
Centralized Management
Having standardized process automation across various factories gives you a unified view of each site’s operations, including data that provides valuable insights into production performance. Having standardized data from all of your plants ensures reduced variability in your processes and more confident decision-making for:
- Optimizing production schedules
- Allocating resources
- Responding to changes in demand or production requirements
Improved Efficiency, Consistency, and Accuracy
Manufacturing process automation applies computer control and robotic systems to handle repetitive tasks throughout your processes, from manufacturing products with automated CNC machining systems to preparing products for shipping with packaging and palletizing robots. Quality control processes also become more consistent and effective in catching errors and ensuring product quality. Implementing automation consistently across multiple plants raises all of your production facilities to the same high standards and empowers you to maintain a strong reputation among your customers for quality they can rely on.
Reduced Operating and Scaling Costs
Automation in the manufacturing industry has empowered companies of all shapes and sizes to stay competitive in the long term and reduce costs while seizing opportunities for future growth. By implementing a standardized automation system across multiple locations, you reduce the need for more expensive custom solutions in your plants and minimize maintenance and training expenses.
Additionally, standardized automation in your factories makes it easier to scale up your operations and break into new markets when the opportunity arises. With standardized solutions across your existing facilities, new plants or production lines are more cost-effective to build and can be integrated into your existing systems with minimal disruption to your processes.
Five Tips to Standardize Advanced Automation for Your Industrial Workflows
Whatever form your automated manufacturing systems might currently take, the process of updating them to ensure every plant is operating on the same standard might sound too daunting to consider. However, by breaking down the process of assessing the needs of your facilities and implementing new solutions, a mountain can turn into just a series of molehills.
Here are our tips for implementing standardized automation solutions across all your plants:
1. Conduct a Comprehensive Assessment
Begin by evaluating your current automation systems and processes across all plants with an eye for what their individual automated manufacturing systems have in common—and where they differ. Knowing where inconsistencies exist informs you what needs to be changed and what doesn’t.
2. Develop a Unified Automation Strategy
All successful industrial automation integration projects begin with a plan. Yours should outline the standards, protocols, and technologies that are to be used across all locations, with an eye for how your automation should align with your overall business objectives. When outlining your plan, make sure to consult with key stakeholders, such as plant managers, engineers, and IT specialists, to ensure buy-in and successful implementation.
3. Invest in Scalable Technology Solutions
There’s more than just standardization to consider when implementing automation solutions. You also have the future to consider. When you choose solutions that support interoperability and can be seamlessly connected across different systems and platforms, you ensure that as your business grows, you can more easily and effectively expand to more locations and integrate new technologies without sacrificing cohesion and consistency.
4. Implement Robust Training Programs
An unavoidable consequence of updating the automation of your manufacturing processes is that your employees will need to be trained on your plants’ new systems and processes. The good news is that standardized automation solutions mean you only need one training program to educate your staff on the standardized automation tools and procedures in all of your locations. Continuous training and support will help maintain consistency and encourage adoption across all levels of your organization.
5. Monitor and Optimize Continuously
Standardizing automation in your factories is an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring and optimization. As you adapt to your new standardized systems, pay especially close attention to their performance using relevant metrics and KPIs to make sure you’re getting the intended results of your standardized automation workflows—and so you can take steps to make adjustments if you aren’t.
Read our case study and explore a real-world example of how multi-plant operations can reap the benefits of fully standardized manufacturing process automation systems:
Hold Your Plants to Higher Standards with ASI
Standardization ensures consistency. By establishing uniform procedures, guidelines, and practices, you ensure more predictable outcomes, reduced errors, and improved quality in your products and services—quality customers can trust every time they interact with you.
If you operate multiple plants, implementing automation consistently across all of them and keeping them all on the same page ensures that your customers enjoy the same experience no matter which plants handle their order.
When it comes to automation in the manufacturing industry, ASI is the US Southeast’s leading expert. We’ve helped manufacturers of all shapes and sizes across the country modernize their systems. As FANUC Level 2 integrators boasting extensive experience with a wide range of robotics and control system vendors, our expertise touches every aspect of automation and control for the US’s industrial manufacturing sectors.
We do more than build your custom turnkey automation solutions—we provide comprehensive lifecycle support, whether it be providing operator training, taking care of routine maintenance or emergency repairs, or implementing upgrades as needed to keep your plants future-ready.
At ASI, we’re not just automation solution vendors—we’re your partners for life. Contact our engineers today and find out how we can help you hold your plants to higher standards:
