Identify problems early, prove robot ROI and reduce your stress. These are just 3 of the top 5 reasons to have Insights on every robot.

Insights sends you custom alerts wherever you are

Here at Robotiq, we have a decade of experience helping people like you to successfully deploy robots to their business. We have seen time and time again how effective robots are at improving processes in a diverse range of industries.

But, until recently, something fundamental was missing.

There was no easy way to analyze a robot's performance to determine how effective it really is. Insights, a new software solution we launched a few months ago, provides a way to monitor the robot's performance in real time. It allows you to monitor the top KPIs for any number of robots in your business, from one robot to a fleet of dozens.

The response to Insights has been great. People like you are experiencing how analytics can help to streamline the performance of a single robot. However, if you have multiple robots, you might be wondering whether it is really necessary to add Insights to every robot in your process. You might think: "Surely I only need to add Insights on those robots I know have problems? If a robot cell is running smoothly, do I really need to monitor it?"

Here are five reasons that it's beneficial to have Insights on every robot in your business.

Top 5 reasons to have Insights on every robot

1. Identify problems early

Insights is a bit different from the other process tracking methods you might have used in the past. This is because it is a real-time, cobot-specific monitoring software.

Traditional KPI measuring solutions — like most Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), for example — usually require operators to manually enter robot cell data into the software becuase they are not easily integrated with collaborative robots. This makes them time-consuming and inconvenient. Insights, on the other hand, gives you automatic, continuous feedback on every robot.

A huge advantage of real-time monitoring is that it allows you to identify unexpected problems very early. Insights can send automatic notifications to your email and/or mobile phone. When all robots are connected to Insights, you can be sure that you will catch any error immediately.

2. Maximize robot use

Robots will only provide value to your business when they are actually performing tasks. A common loss occurs when robots sit idle, e.g. because they have finished their task or they have encountered an error. Before Insights, robots could sit idle for hours without anybody realizing that there was a problem.

Insights will inform you as soon as a robot stops performing a task. You can then resolve the situation in the best way possible. For example, if one robot has stopped due to an error, the engineer can solve the problem within minutes of it occurring. If the robot has finished its task, you can easily move it to another job in the process.

3. Achieve continuous improvement

Lean Robotics is a methodology we created to maximize your use of robots. A fundamental concept in the methodology is "continuous improvement" which means that you and your team should always strive to improve the operation of your robot cells. However, you can only achieve such improvement when you continually measure the performance of the robots. Otherwise, how will you know which aspects of the operation are not working properly?

By adding Insights to all of your robots, you can easily identify which cells are performing below expectations and how you can improve them.

Insights to achieve continuous improvement.

4. Prove robot ROI

Calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) of your robot cells is vital for proving that the robotics is a good investment. While it is possible to estimate the ROI using ballpark figures, it is much more accurate to use analytics to prove the ROI. Insights provides an easy way to measure some of the most important ROI metrics.

5. Reduce your stress

Yes it's true! Adding Insights to all of your robots can actually reduce your stress. I mean, I've not done any research to prove this, but it seems obvious to me. "How?" you ask…

Here are two versions of the same scenario to demonstrate how Insights can reduce your stress:

• Without Insights — In the morning, the overall production of your process seems fine, but you worry: Are all the robot cells really working at optimum performance? You guess so, but you can't be sure. Suddenly, at 3pm, the production level of the whole process plummets. What is causing the problem? Nobody knows! You panic. You drop everything and devote all your energy to finding the root of the problem. It takes hours before you finally discover that one of the robots went out of sync with the previous cell in the process. The robot entered a failure state at noon and has been holding up the entire process for the entire afternoon. It's now the end of the shift and you don't have time to fix the problem until tomorrow morning. You have failed to meet the day's production target. It will take you all week to catch up again! Stressful, right?
• With Insights — In the morning, you log on to insights.robotiq.com and see that all of your robot cells are running smoothly. Then, at noon, you receive a notification that one of the robots has entered a failure state. You log onto Insights again and identify the problem within a few minutes. You are able to get the robot cell up and running again quickly and you easily meet the day's production target. Simple, right?

How to apply Insights to every robot

You can only truly experience the value of real-time monitoring by trying it out yourself!

It is very easy to add Insights to all of your robots. You just download the URCap and load it into each robot via its teach pendant. Sign up now to check out the demo robot.