Ways the Auto Industry is Improving Production Line Productivity

Auto industry manufacturers are facing an immense amount of pressure from consumers with the supply and demand of cars. In the minds of the consumer, they don’t think about the time and energy assembly line workers put into building the cars that they want so badly… all they know is that they want the new model Lexus that just came out!

Because of the pressure and high demand of the industry, manufacturers have taken some new approaches to meet those demands and increase productivity. One of the approaches they’re taking is by way of machine vision-based quality assurance.

This approach to productivity not only prevents classification errors but it also prevents low-quality products from being sent to the next level in the supply chain. When mistakes like this happen, it can lead to reputational damage to the company and it can also cause issues in company to client relationships as well.

Machine vision-based quality assurance is only one of the ways productivity is increased in production lines. In addition to that, we’ll take a look at other ways the auto industry is taking productivity to the next level. First, take a look at machine vision-based quality assurance.

How Machine Vision-Based Quality Assurance is Improving Production Line Productivity
According to photonics.com, machine vision in the automotive industry is a technology used to optimize processes in the value chain. It optimizes things like logistics, quality assurance, and, of course, productivity. This particular technology is used in many different applications. It performs inspections of component surfaces, detection for completeness, and it identifies and sorts out defective products.

One of the best features of machine vision is its speed and agility. For its detection processes, the algorithms only require a few milliseconds, allowing a mass amount of products to undergo automatic inspection in a very short amount of time.

If you thought that machine vision is an impressive way to improve productivity on production lines, then wait until you read about vacuum impregnation.

How Vacuum Impregnation is Improving Production Line Productivity
There has been a major surge in aluminum use in recent years… decades rather. Everything from sustainable practices like recycling aluminum shavings to its heavy use in the auto industry, aluminum is a metal that’s in high demand for many industries. In fact, Spark R&D is a company based out of Bozeman, MT that uses recycled aluminum shavings in conjunction with solar power to manufacture their products in-house!

But the demand for aluminum use in car manufacturing is where it’s heavily used. Why has the demand for aluminum increased? Well, it’s increased because it improves braking and handling, it reduces the overall weight of a car, and it extends gas mileage… Those reasons alone are major selling points to customers and play a significant role as to why aluminum is such a hot commodity in the auto industry.

Did you know that there is about 400 pounds of aluminum used in most cars now? That’s a lot. But because of its high demand, those 400 pounds are projected to increase to 550 pounds by the year 2025! That’s an increase of 150 pounds!

So what does that mean for the auto industry? That means that they’re making some major changes in their productivity practices. More and more companies are bringing in impregnation machines to eradicate the porosity that comes with aluminum castings. Because the demand is so high for aluminum components, companies are bringing these impregnation machines in-house to eliminate the costs of outsourcing for impregnation services. That’s productivity and efficiency at its finest!

How Manufacturing Robots are Improving Production Line Productivity
There was a point in time where people feared robots in the instance of them taking their jobs. That’s when the “Rise of the Robots” scare came to be. When robots were brought onto the production line, people were afraid that they were going to lose their jobs because the robots could do their jobs better and faster.

Well, the truth is that the robots indeed could do the job of a human much better and with more accuracy and speed. The thing that people failed to realize is that the robots weren’t brought in to put people out of jobs… the robots were brought in to increase productivity and ultimately improve the safety of production line workers.

Car manufacturing robots have made a huge contribution to productivity in the automotive industry. These manufacturing robots have protected workers from dangerous responsibilities, improved the quality of products, and relieved bottleneck, to name a few perks...

The robots have heavily been used in spot welding and painting of cars but are utilized in other areas as well. But the biggest reason why manufacturers utilize robots is that robots are the driving force behind manufacturing capacity, worker safety, and quality of products.