Fanuc allows King to profitably produce car parts

King Automotive Systems, owned by Amtek, produces components for customers including Jaguar, Land Rover, Renault, Ford and BMW.

Six years ago the company installed its first FANUC robot into a brake disc manufacturing cell.

A senior manufacturing manager for King said: 'Competing against overseas suppliers means that our labour costs are generally higher, so we aim to remove as much of that cost from the job as possible.

'Though it's important for us to reduce labour costs, it's not the only justification for using robots: control of our quality, cost and delivery are all improved by automation.' King first selected FANUC Robotics six years ago.

Acting in a consultancy role, FANUC's sales engineering support-team analysed automation requirements with King.

The first installation loaded castings into a disc machining cell.

The manager said: 'We chose this first application, which was already operating with operators loading machines, for several reasons: all existing machines were in close proximity to each other, it was labour intensive and at the time there was capacity available to stop the cell while implementing the system and fine tuning it, an important consideration when retrofitting robots to an existing system.

'In system engineering terms it was relatively straight-forward with the robot taking a disc from a loading area and handling it through two machine centres.

'It saved 50 per cent of operators over three shifts.' King has now installed 11 FANUC robots.

The manager added: 'You would in the early days (of robot installations at King) get resistance to technology, but any issues have now been removed as the workforce understands the necessity to remain competitive and in fact benefit by being moved onto less arduous and less repetitive tasks; now the robot does the less skilled tasks.' King's two latest lines are producing knuckle joints for BMW's Mini and for the Land Rover Freelander.

The Mini line has seven machine centres with two FANUC robots loading and two deburring and the Freelander has three machine centres with one FANUC robot loading and deburring.

Components are loaded onto a pallet conveyor that positions the product in a handling area for the robots to load and unload the joints.

Each cell is manned by one setter operator.

There are three shifts.

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