Established in 1989, Michigan Automotive Compressor maintains a 786,000-square-foot produc-tion facility equipped with some 200 robots and 650 production machines.
To protect one of its under-the-hood automotive connectors, the company needed to encapsulate some 80 wires that allow the plug-in device to tie together an onboard computer network.
A lean transformation requires striking a difficult balance between leveraging the efforts of the whole organization and enabling local ownership and drive.
Automakers usually try to find the best way to assemble the cars they build. In a bizarre twist on this theme, Mazda has spent the past 2 years and probably millions of dollars figuring out how to destroy cars.
At press time, American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings Inc. (Detroit) remains locked in a month-plus long strike with the United Auto Workers union over proposed pay cuts.
Robots can bring the same flexibility, efficiency, accuracy and tirelessness to test and inspection applications as they can to more traditional tasks.
RSS