This is a MiR Mobile Robots company case study.
One of the world’s leading manufacturers of intelligent power meters, Kamstrup, has experienced significant growth in the last few years. The global market for meters for water, electricity and heating is booming in line with the increased focus on energy, efficiency and sustainability.
At Kamstrup, autonomous mobile robots from Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) are essential; they have challenged the traditional conveyor belts in the production hall in which semi-finished and finished items are transported between production lines and robotic cells.
The MiR robots are now the adaptable link between the cells. Even though a conveyor belt costs half the price of a MiR robot, the value of the flexibility added by the mobile robots means that it pays for Kamstrup to use the practical robots from MiR.
The MiR robots run non-stop, 24 hours a day, five days a week. Conveyor top modules are deployed on the robots, enabling them to automatically deliver and receive items at the robotic cells. The fully automated and flexible solution ensures maximum utilisation of production capacity. Production Manager at Kamstrup, Flemming Møller Hansen, explains:
“The prerequisite to securing our growth position in the global market is refining the products, reducing costs, and ensuring a short delivery time. Our production is characterised by High-Mix, High-Volume. Therefore, we invest in flexible automation. We have increased our production volume while integrating new automation solutions for more than 30 million DKK (4,500,000 USD) into our existing production layout. Unusually, we have been able to avoid downtime, which at the same time has doubled. If we had chosen conveyor belts instead of mobile robots, it would have meant a lot of costly production downtime, says Flemming Møller Hansen, Kamstrup.
Kamstrup develops and manufactures all its products at its headquarters in Stilling, Denmark. In 2017, Kamstrup built another production hall in which another fleet of 7-10 MiR robots will link processes and ensure efficiency.
It has been crucial to our success with the MiR robots that they can be easily integrated and adapted to run in existing production, says Flemming Møller Hansen. He and his colleagues have had a good and efficient dialogue between Kamstrup, the local engineer and MiR dealer, Bila, and MiR’s technical team:
The iterative process of cooperation has been very positive, and the response time has been short. Usually, it is probably safer to lure a little instead of being one of the first to use relatively new and innovative technologies. But our growth rate means we could not wait, so we decided to invest in mobile robots. We tested and compared the solutions of two different manufacturers, and MiR by far performed the best, states Kamstrup’s Production Manager.
To find out more about MiR robots, visit our MiR Autonomous Mobile Robots page.
