VIDEO: How To Know If Automation Is Right For You

Jacob Sanchez: Yeah, there has to be something more than this. I can't do this day in and day out. All of this is not what abrasion and grinding is all about. All of this isn't what our industry is about right? And something that just comes to mind when I think of efficiency. It's always automation. You know me. I'm all about finding ways that we can create something for our customers and ourselves that benefit our industry.

And that's what I found today in Northborough, Mass. I'm at the Higgins Grinding Technology Center, and they have something called the APS. And while it doesn't mean anything to you now, it will in a little bit. Imagine the abrasion and automation world finally colliding to create something beautiful, efficient, something to save my back and you money. So, let's get down to it.

I'm going to get out of this, something more casual, and let's find out how you can learn How To know if automation is right for you.

Tony Landes: So you are entering the Higgins Grinding and Technology Center. And right here is the APS lab.

Jacob Sanchez: All right. It's time to get to the nitty gritty. I want you guys to see what this cell is all about. And to help me do that, I got Mike Shappell, an automation application engineer here at Norton, and Tony Landes, APS manager of this entire system. How's it going, fellas? As the manager of this cell, how did this happen?

Give me the how.

Tony Landes: At Norton Company, Saint Gobain Norton, we've always taken pride in sending application engineers out to our customers to help the customer apply our abrasives to their applications. But in recent years, you've seen a shift for companies wanting to automate their processes, which creates a challenge.

Jacob Sanchez: What's that? What's that challenge? What do you mean it creates a challenge?

Tony Landes: The challenge is, you know, for years and years, we've been using this with a hand grinder.

Jacob Sanchez: Oh, okay.

Tony Landes: So now, how do you take the same process that was done by hand and now automate that?

Jacob Sanchez: I get ya, there is the challenge.

Tony Landes: And so this lab, the impetus for this lab, is to help the customer take this product and go from a manual to an automation.

Mike Shappell: Yeah, because what we were seeing in the field was a lot of conversations with our customers, our end users, that we can't get people, we can't keep people. And so they realized what we know is that you're going to have to automate in the next few years to be competitive. And so that was a big part of why we saw as Norton Abrasives, as an industry leader, we needed to help show them that they could automate that manual process. It was possible.

Jacob Sanchez: So I'm ready. I'm excited. Let's go meet Nathan. So I'm here with the lead programmer of this cell, Nathan Jackson. How's it going, brother?

Nathan Jackson: Good. Happy to be here.

Jacob Sanchez: You know what, man? I want to hear it. I want to know it. What does this cell do for me? I'm a customer. I'm coming in. Start me from A to Z. What have we got here?

Nathan Jackson: So right now, we're standing in front of what we call the part to abrasive section of the cell. This is for the customers who right now have an operator picking up the small, high volume parts and taking them over to a grinding head. Up here we have our top head. This is 15 horsepower, for belts, and it has compliance built in.

So what that means is it's going to grind with whatever force we tell it to, constantly.

Jacob Sanchez: How heavy is..

Nathan Jackson: We've got about 30 pounds on there right now.

Jacob Sanchez: You made it look easy.

Nathan Jackson: So this is the finishing head, as we call it. It's only five horse because this is mainly meant for your finishing and polishing operations. So right here we have a fixed abrasive buff, which is just like a standard buff, but with the abrasive fixed inside of it. And what this allows us to do is we can put a part that's up to 1,000 pounds on here, and then we can get into pretty much any area on the part between the six axes on the robot and the two axes here.

Jacob Sanchez: And so everything interacts with this guy. This is the star of the show.

Nathan Jackson: Yes, absolutely. And we went with the 210 kilogram robot for a reason, because we never want to have to tell a customer we can't run your part, our robots are too small.

Jacob Sanchez: Finding somebody like this that can help you de-risk challenges that you're facing or you think you may face. If you have that available to you, why not take it? You know, what man let's get out of here. Talking about risk, I want to get out of this cell and see some sparks fly.

So let's wrap up today. We've talked about de-risking, de-risking fears on the customer side and on the integrator side. It goes both ways. We talked about what this process actually brings to you. It's not just you sending a part and then, yeah, you can do it here at Norton. No, they're giving you the resources to slap on the table with your leadership team and say, this is what we get when we get into automation.

This is what we can do with automation. Nathan, what's one more thing? What am I missing about what we've learned today? 

Nathan Jackson: Well you know, we're not just, you know, developing solutions for our customers using the products that we already have. We're actually taking the roadblocks that we encounter when developing these processes back to our product engineers and developing new products best suited for automation. So Norton Saint Gobain is so committed to automating grinding that we're literally developing new products on a daily basis, specifically to go in a robotic cell.

Jacob Sanchez: Again, it's not just for them, it's not just for the customer. Norton Saint Gobain wants to bring the abrasion industry and the automation industry together to lift them up. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about. Developing a better product, a better process for everyone. So thank you to Norton Saint Gobain for bringing me here today and helping all of us tell the story to you on How To know if automation is right for you.

Narrator: For more metalworking tips and industry best practices, stay tuned for the next How To episode and subscribe to the MSC Industrial Supply YouTube channel, a source of original manufacturing content Built to Make You Better.