Mobile robot improves Elos Medtech Pinol’s production flow

A wave of automation has washed over the medical technology industry worldwide in recent years, even in countries with lower labor costs than Denmark. This is a challenge that Elos—one of Europe’s leading development and production partners for medical technology products and components—is now ready for.

Staff previously walked an average of more than 4.5 miles a day, while pushing goods on a cart between departments. Now, a mobile robot provides a faster, steadier flow of materials through production, eliminating downtime and latency.

The robot runs continuously in a fixed route within the facility. On an annual basis, the robot logs more than 1,000 miles. Those operation hours amount to half a full-time employee position, which is now freed up to perform tasks other than internal transport.

“Staff members who normally had to transport goods for further processing in other departments can now place them on robot when it passes on its bus route,” says Per Hansen, a developer at Elos. “This means they can avoid downtime and interruptions and continue processing the goods in their own department.”

Although automating work processes (in a company that produces more than 3,000 different item numbers in batches) down to 100 units is not always simple, Elos’ results speak for themselves: The order book is growing, earnings have increased and growth continues. In fact, the company has nearly reduced its average order lead time in half, requiring only 16 days from production start to delivery, compared to 30 days in 2012.

Elos has also succeeded in “growing out of the risk” of terminating employees as a result of automation investments, as its total manageable staff has risen from 116 to 145 employees over two years. Along with automation to improve productivity, new jobs have been created within the highly specialized manual assembly, in R&D and in administration.

“We want to grow without adding more people than what is actually dictated by growth,” says Henrik Andersen, head of R&D at Elos. “Automation is a strategic focus area and our investment budget is increasingly allocated [to] more automation, [rather than] just machinery.”

Andersen adds, “Whenever we invest in new equipment, it is now a requirement that it is a more automated solution than the one we already have. The objective is to reduce the amount of repetitive work and to strengthen the quality assurance of our products.”

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