Do you want to speed things up in your plant? Are you sure?
Faster is usually possible, but will the equipment take the load? What will the next bottleneck be?
We had a client who spent a ton of money to speed up the packing section of his plant to 2x the capacity. He could run his lines at 1600 widgets a minute. Pretty exciting.
Unfortunately, the batching capacity of product at the front end of the plant turned out to be maxed out at 1.1x the previous rate. Our client would have had to build an entire new batch setup to get any more capacity.
The problem is a narrow view. It’s easy to make plans based on the idea that one thing can be changed and everything else will remain the same. This is like thinking you can drop a stone into water and nothing will change except that the stone will get wet.
In actuality, the stone hits the water and causes ripples that move outward for quite some distance before the effect ends. There’s displacement. There might even be a splash. And that’s just a stone and some water. Making changes in one part of your system will unavoidably have effects elsewhere in the system.
This issue tends to come up when you consider upgrading. You can get all excited over the thought that an upgrade of one part will make everything go faster. Think twice — maybe even three times. Speed is a dangerous goal if you don’t consider the whole system.
Systems thinking is essential when you’re considering motion control in your plant. Sometimes factory repair or reman of your current machinery is the best choice. If it’s not time to upgrade your Rexroth electric motion control systems, get the whole system into perfect working order.
If it’s time to upgrade, we can help you. We specialize in Rexroth electric drive and control systems, both legacy and cutting-edge.