Creating an automation roadmap with Andrews Cooper can increase manufacturing yields, lower COGs, improve quality and enhance safety in your manufacturing environments.
Our automation expertise spans industries including medical, consumer electronics, food, industrial, aerospace, semiconductor, and more. A custom roadmap can tailor industry best practices to your unique automation challenges.
Lean on 23 years of engineering excellence across R&D, Product Development, Hardware Test, and Manufacturing Automation.
Harry Richards
Automation Program Director
How Automation Roadmaps Help You
Engage Your Leadership Team Early – AC meets with leadership and key stakeholders of your company to deeply understand and invest in your processes, products, and company mission.
> Investigate Complex Automation Challenges – Let’s review known obstacles and potentially uncover hidden issues: what are the bottlenecks, what steps have the greatest impact on yield, what steps are labor intensive or require highly skilled labor, what is your greatest safety and human factors concern, and so forth.
> Lay the Groundwork for Seamless Integration – Through site visits and conversations we will observe each process and interview operators to thoroughly understand your manufacturing process.
> Identify and Score Opportunities – By first identifying areas for improvement, we then score based on criteria unique to your company. Examples include ROI, yield, cost, safety, productivity, and module efficiency. The scoring criteria is weighted based on your priorities.
With this roadmap, we implement improvements with custom automation, documentation, installation, qualification, preventative maintenance, and service and support. Contact us today to see if AC is the right automation partner for your business goals.
Sessions with AC Presenters from ATX West
Custom Automation Roadmapping Transcription:
So one of the primary things that we like to focus on when we’re engaging with new clients is the automation roadmap. And that can differ vastly for different clients, depending on industry, depending on products, depending on where they sit within the development cycle. Roadmapping is a very open term, but it can be defined as having a plan for how you intend to automate and test your product when it transitions into manufacturing.
Some of the areas that we like to focus on are active de-risking of your products, of your manufacturing process. This is especially pertinent in the medical field where you are developing a product, you may be a startup, you are looking to have a plan for transfer to manufacturing and build out your risk file on your manufacturing strategy.
Andrews Cooper can engage early, we can support you with automation expertise, product development expertise that may be outside the skill sets of the core team and we’re prepared to engage in very ambiguous situations and scenarios. Part of that is to build that relationship, become the experts of your product, become the experts of the pressing needs of your processes and your testing regime and be supporting you during that transfer and development. Now, the complexity that comes in with automation mode that’s in that scenario Is by virtue of the ambiguity. You need a partner who can be prepared to be flexible, to change, to develop as you are working through this but by taking a very pragmatic approach to risk, by evaluating that risk and doing very targeted studies of how we can reduce risk and prove out the manufacturing methodologies, it can go a long way towards both securing financing for next stage development for your product, if you’re a startup or for speeding the launch into market in a very stable and risk-averse manner.
Roadmapping really depends on your needs as a client, where you sit in the market, what products you have and where they sit within the product lifecycle, but also building that relationship with a trusted supplier partner who can really take your mission and your priorities to heart and be focused on those critical aspects of it rather than responding to a static URS. Often cases of URS is seen as a competitive document, it needs to be a collaborative document. It’s where we define, develop and respond to the needs of the customer, the client, the market, the future, in taking ownership of developing that with you.
As part of that roadmapping exercise, we can become that trusted integrated partner that is not looking simply to make profit of a standalone engagement, but is looking at the next decade of relationship where we can both benefit as a result.