Engineering news
Japanese automation and robotics firm Fanuc now has more than 100 staff at its Coventry factory and believes the upturn in the manufacturing sector is not softening, despite slight weaknesses in recent PMI surveys.
Chris Sumner, managing director, Fanuc UK, said the firm had enjoyed a good summer, with new orders at a result of Interplas and the Mach machine tool show. There had been “substantial orders from automotive companies”, which were at “record levels” for the UK business. The medical market was also doing well. All-electric injection moulding machines were proving popular as a replacement for hydraulic and hybrid hydraulic-electric systems, Sumner said.
He added that Japanese-owned Fanuc's “holistic” approach to automation, in which robots are combined with bespoke vision, motion control, and CNC systems was paying dividends. “Nobody else makes robotics with motion control and vision so it's very good,” he said.
At Mach, the company exhibited a bespoke aerospace robot which could potentially replace some manually intensive jobs such as riveting wings. Sumner said it would take a while for the sector to adopt such technologies but he believed change was coming. “We've obviously had interest: we know the aerospace industry very well. There has to be a lot of innovation. There is a lot of interest but aerospace orders are not coming immediately – it is going to take a period of investigation, and they are going to have some very strict criteria to hit.”
Summer shutdowns of factories that had stretched on longer than usual were not necessarily a sign of an industry slowdown, he said. “They haven't necessarily been a bad thing. Some firms have had to shut down longer than usual in order to install lots of new equipment, so this has been a sign that investment is taking place.”
This has been true in the automotive industry, Sumner said. “Some have had to cease production for a four-week period so there is a knock-on effect of a period of time twice as long with no production.” There was still a job to be done in terms of promotion of automation for manufacturing, he said. “It takes some time to get people to see the effectiveness and explain the potential there of going into this sort of area.”