Helping machine builders to cut time, cost and risk

Rexroth's automation strategy directly confronts the challenges facing machine builders in terms of minimising time-to-market and production time, reducing overall cost of ownership, and managing risk. It also acknowledges and counters the well-documented trend concerning the gradual erosion of engineering knowledge from within UK industry, as experienced by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), system integrators and end users.

Seven areas

Traditionally, machine designers have considered products in seven distinct areas, with choices to be made in each of these for every new project:

• Hydraulics
• Electric drives
• Pneumatics
• Safety
• Controls
• Conveying
• Mechanics

Each of these areas will normally have several companies bidding to have their products included on the bill of materials (BOM) and inevitably selected suppliers tend to focus on their own area. This approach can cause problems because it complicates the bidding process, increases the time and energy it takes to source the machine elements. Furthermore, in the event of a machine breakdown and the need for support, there can be significant difficulties and expense incurred in determining culpability and organising repair or replacement, as a wide supplier base is involved.

Rexroth claims that is has the most comprehensive range of automation technologies available from any of the suppliers in the market. Indeed, many machine builders are not aware that Bosch Rexroth offers all of the following:

• PLCs and industrial automation
• CNC machine controls
• Electric drives
• Hydraulics
• Pneumatics
• Linear components
• Manual production systems
• Guarding
• Tightening and press-fit systems
• Transfer systems
• Welding
• Services

By calling on this broad spread of technologies as required, Rexroth says that it can implement its automation strategy to offer machine builders and end users the lowest cost of ownership.

Lower procurement costs

One simple benefit is that due to the reduced supplier base the cost of procurement is significantly reduced. Working with a single supplier enables a reduction in administration and financial management becomes easier.

In practice, Rexroth engineers from within its UK and Irish application support team work directly with the engineers designing a machine. Rexroth engineers have access to over 250,000 products across the defined disciplines and, more importantly, understand that the overall design of a machine has a greater impact on the customer's competitiveness than solely focusing on component cost. An automation system designed using Rexroth products brings other benefits to machine builders too - such as the use of common mechanical standards across many of the company's technologies, and ease of product interoperability - as many of the products have been designed to work together and are therefore highly compatible. These factors reduce time to market and mitigate risk, as responsibility for interoperability lies with Rexroth and not with the machine builder and a broad supplier base.

Support

Demonstrating the fact that Rexroth's approach helps deal with the challenges that industry faces are the benefits that translate through to the areas of field service and training. Stuart Williams, Automotive Manager for Rexroth says, "Our approach to automation continues to save machine builders cost once the equipment is installed. Presently, when a machine experiences a failure in the field the machine builder may have to request on-site visits by service engineers from two or more component suppliers in turn before the true problem is ascertained and a repair is affected. This can result in days of labour being charged to the machine builder and a period of significant downtime for the end user. Further to this obvious issue with inefficient handling, down the line, there may be difficult-to-quantify but negative effects on the relationship and goodwill between the machine builder and end user.

"When Rexroth is used as sole supplier, we take total responsibility and, therefore, as with many aspects of our automation strategy, customers benefit from an economy of scale. A simple example of this is training. If there are seven different suppliers' technologies on one machine and an end user is running a three shift system, that is an awful lot of training sessions. Rexroth can reduce the time and cost of training dramatically."

Particularly relevant for small to medium sized machine building companies is the fact that Rexroth's global presence means that end users can be supported using Rexroth's infrastructure all over the world. Service can be co-ordinated seamlessly from the manufacturing country to the country in which the machine is operating. This is a major element when considering the total cost of ownership as opposed to the initial savings that can be made during the bid process. It will be a main driver in the end user's decision-making process in the future.

The issue of warranty is also simplified by consolidating suppliers as warranties for all the elements of a machine can be harmonised, allowing peace of mind because the entire machine is fully covered for a defined period. Additionally, the management of spares is rationalised and problems of overstocking or, even more seriously, the non-availability of spares can all be consigned to history.

Rexroth's new automation strategy takes a rounded view of the machine building process and acknowledges that no single technology can meet all efficiency and commercial targets in isolation. Considerable savings, not least in the crucial area of energy consumption, can be made by the intelligent interlinking of a variety of technologies. This approach will benefit UK machine builders by making their designs more competitive and attractive to customers.