Three key benefits of a modern flexible manufacturing system

An FMS helps manage manufacturing resources like time and equipment utilization to manufacture a new or existing products. The advantages of having an FMS in place include reduced manufacturing costs by increasing productivity and machine efficiency, improved and stable quality of the products, and shorter and more accurately scheduled lead times.

With the right solutions in place, modern FMS adopters have said that they have improved production efficiencies of up to 200% while at the same time reduced lead times by over 20%. A modern FMS can help a company streamline their manufacturing processes and by utilizing professional automation engineering design, get more efficiency out of their production lines.

While we still see a lot of production lines handling large quantity and fixed components, today’s market is seeing an increasing demand for enhanced FMS to produce small to medium quantity components and of varying specifications. 

In the past, FMS were often associated with producing small batches of components often requiring long processing time. Mostly FMS have been limited to industries such as aerospace, aviation, prototyping as well as die and mold-making industries.

However, thanks to improved technology and innovative systems integration, today’s FMS methods can adapt much faster and more flexible to ever changing workpieces. Automatic adaptable gripper and fixture solutions, flexible storage spaces, inline- and closed-loop measuring and quality controls as well as the implementation of cutting-tool management handled by the same FMS made it possible.

So nowadays, this technology can be used by a larger segment of industries including automotive, medical, railway train and power industries.

To some extent, I do agree with sceptics that it is not easy to achieve both high flexibility and a high automation grade at the same time in most production lines. It requires a tremendous manufacturing- and process know how – not only about one particular product to be manufactured, but about an entire potential value chain covered by a company.

Almost all manufacturers are nowadays equipped with ERP, PDM, CAD and CAM systems to support their individual value chain. To gain full efficiency out of an FMS, it’s crucial to embed these existing solutions seamlessly into the workshop floor and to the FMS.

Of course, once being equipped with an FMS system, you don’t want to make any manual adjustments on your machine tool. So the planning, programming and sourcing must be done accurately before you start to manufacture.

As this was 10 years ago still a highly engineering intense process, nowadays these integrations have become feasible and affordable, thanks to standardized interfaces and protocols what many understand as “Industry 4.0”.

Therefore, a modern FMS becomes an interlink in-between the planning, engineering and programming departments and the manufacturing workshop floor. Providing full transparency on every single process step along the entire value chain.