Example of a plastic clip assembly robot cycle reduction.

Improvement theme.

In the automatic plastic clip assembly process, workers have to wait while the robot is in operation.

We want to eliminate wasteful waiting time and shorten the working time.

Automatic plastic clip assembly process

10-12 plastic clips are used per product in the assembly process. As manual assembly by humans is expected to result in defective assembly and missing products, automatic assembly is carried out using a parts feeder and robot.

Before the improvement, plastic clips were taken out of the parts feeder one by one for assembly.

This required a number of round trips between the product and the parts feeder, which was time-consuming.

[Improvement measures implemented].

In order to reduce the number of times the parts feeder and products are returned to and from the parts feeder, the system was changed from holding one resin clip to holding two clips.

This has halved the round trip time, but could it be further improved if we could carry more? We thought.

The plastic clips have been converted to 5 clips. This has reduced the number of round trips from 10 to 2 for products with 10 resin clips.

The number of round trips could be reduced from 10 to 2.

*In products that use 12 resin clips, the number of clips has been reduced to six.

Furthermore, the jig has been improved so that it can grip several resin clips at once, instead of having to grip them one at a time.

The jig has been improved so that several clips can be gripped at once.

These improvement activities have reduced machine operating time! The annual improvement effect amounted to 9 million yen.