3D printing puts fixtures into gear

whitePaper | August 3, 2022

Automakers, OEMs, and suppliers have faced unprecedented challenges in the wake of COVID-19. From chip shortages to truck barricades on the US–Canada border cutting off the flow of products, the automotive industry has been severely impacted by challenges that are leading to a loss of sales and frustrated customers. Advanced technologies are no longer “nice to have” but are now essential as automotive manufacturers step up their game to provide customers with more for less. Patched together, legacy systems, and outdated functionality tend to create more confusion than answers. Disconnected, siloed teams struggle with unreliable data and no clear vision for gaining new customers and retaining the old.

whitePaper | July 7, 2022

Production scheduling primarily deals with arranging different jobs in various machines based on the timelines for each job. There can be numerous combinations of schedules possible. Production schedules can be designed to maximize the capacity utilization, minimize idle time of the machine, earliness, overall costs etc. Manual design of a schedule can be a tedious and time consuming task. There are a lot of dependencies which the scheduler needs to tweak based on a single change. Generating a production schedule targeting a specific objective function can be done using mathematical models. Mathematical models involve formulating the production scheduling problem as an optimization model wherein there is a certain objective function which needs to be optimized based on a set of constraints. Mathematical models generally outperform manually designed schedules which involve a lot of inter-dependencies among the jobs. Due to improvement in computational power, developing a production schedule using mathematical models is relatively quick and efficient.

whitePaper | June 3, 2022

Production and intralogistics in the consumer goods industry are currently undergoing significant changes. This is the result of rising cost pressures and the need for greater automation as well as increasing product variants and customization. The changes that are taking place also relate to the goal of digitization: Every sensor, every machine, and all people involved in the production and intralogistics processes should be able to communicate with each other at all times. The vertical and, in the next step, horizontal networking of sensors, machines and factories is the systematic further development of this digitalization.

whitePaper | July 30, 2020

After the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly ground the world to a halt in the first few months of 2020, it created both new challenges for the manufacturing industry and exacerbated those that had existed for some time. According to an article by McKinsey & Company analysts,1 the future we expected by 2020 hasn’t quite come to pass. Rather than a significant shift towards more automation and a smaller workforce, the opposite is true, due in part to the pandemic.

whitePaper | September 21, 2022

Additive manufacturing (AM) has matured significantly as a manufacturing technique over the last 5 years. Along with this, knowledge of AM within companies has increased and its opportunities are increasingly discussed at board-level. Time and budget are invested to explore the potential for 3D printing beyond the most obvious applications. More than ever before, there’s an appetite to take a strategic approach and maximize the opportunity

whitePaper | June 1, 2022

In the field of multi-axis robots, industrial integrators are faced with the unique challenge of selecting and managing cables to be run on the outside of a moving six-axis platform. The complex movements made by six-axis robots require special consideration when deciding on how to manage their cable systems. “There are many unsuitable ways to accomplish this, from corrugated tubing used in static wiring, to on the fly fixes such as duct tape andbungee cords,” Don Nester, Product Manager for Chainflex® Continuous flex cables at igus® explained.