ENABLING MANUFACTURING FLEXIBILITY:
THE VEO FREEMOVE Veo Robotics’ FreeMoveTM system makes close collaboration between humans and industrial robots possible. The system introduces safe and flexible manufacturing processes that reduce production and retooling costs, while granting manufacturers the ability to respond to all kinds of demand fluctuations. Alberto Moel, vice president strategy and partnerships at Veo Robotics explains.
At Veo Robotics, our fundamental assertion is that full-on automation is inflexible and fragile, and that high levels of automation can be terribly uneconomic. Conversely, an all-human manufacturing approach is also suboptimal under many reasonable conditions—the best outcome is a mix of humans and machines safely working together. The underlying economic reason is that combining the complementary strengths of humans and machines gives the entire system valuable flexibility to respond to changing conditions and uncertainty. If a manufacturing process is fully flexible, it is easy to quickly ramp production up or down depending on demand, and that adjustment can be done without expense so that unit economics are not affected. If, on the other hand, the process is inflexible, adjusting production volumes up or down will entail costly fixturing and reprogramming, and unit economics will be negatively affected. The takeaway from all of this is that production flexibility has value, and its value is highest when process requirements are uncertain, and lowest when they are certain. The need for flexibility is increasing as product variability increases and production runs get shorter. And as humans are infinitely flexible, one of the easiest ways to
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incorporate flexibility is to add more (not less) human input into the manufacturing process. Building flexibility into production processes by making them safe for human and machine collaboration is almost always going to be the most cost-effective choice. Using tools like the Veo FreeMoveTM system, manufacturers will be able to automate the tasks that are most efficiently done by machines while retaining the flexibility of human workers to safely manage tasks that
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