How Life Cycle Management Increases Plant Availability

Robot-based systems are among the most promising, most important and most valuable capital goods in almost all branches of the manufacturing industry. Ensuring their availability over the entire life cycle is an essential task in design and development. Industrial robots with their actuator and above all control technology components form the head and heart of these systems. You are at the center when it comes to planning long-term success in operating automated systems. Because sustainably ensuring the highest possible system availability goes beyond the usual maintenance and servicing.

Potential of a strategy of life cycle management

The successful example from the automotive industry of robot-assisted painting systems shows the potential of a strategy of life cycle management (LCM). LCM is based on a holistic view of the life cycle and integrates, for example, the spare parts concept Spareconsulting. Condition monitoring and diagnostics with Connected Services from ABB detects the risk of errors in the future of the system and signals them to the robot user. By avoiding expensive downtimes and failures, plant operators and users gain maximum availability.

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Robot-assisted painting systems are a typical application of industrial robots. In automated production at automobile manufacturers and their system suppliers, they first established themselves and now also shape the picture in industries such as the furniture or consumer goods industries. Your possible downtime, be it due to maintenance work or the failure of a part, usually has a cost-increasing effect on the entire production. Follow-up repairs are often required. The associated downtime of the paint shop and the consequently affected production usually cost significantly more than eliminating the bottleneck.

Take active care of a system for life

ABB counters this cost risk with the Life Cycle Management (LCM) strategy. The lifelong active care of a plant and its optimal application begins with its selection, goes through planning, commissioning, training of employees and accompanying service activities including spare parts up to possible reconditioning of the entire plant or individual parts. The spare parts concept Spareconsulting plays an important role in robot-assisted painting systems. It starts with the system planning and ranges from the selection of the components to their availability as spare parts.

ABB service experts are already involved in system planning. Technology experts in robot-assisted painting systems at a large German automobile manufacturer have had good experiences with this. The consultation partners of ABB advise on the choice of application-specific components. This goes far beyond the robot-specific components. In the specific case example, it concerns components such as color change systems, two-component mixers, paint kits for the external robot axes and atomizers. In addition, there are other components or modules of conveyor and plant technology, e.g. B. Tool positioners and air control units.

Content of the article:

• Page 1: How life cycle management increases plant availability
• Page 2: Optimal selection of components and parts
• Page 3: Repair ended quickly

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