 Good afternoon everyone, and we'd like to welcome you to the webinar hosted by CPA, the Association for Contract Packagers and Manufacturers, and today we're highlighting the exciting story of automation. Today's session is titled, Packaging with Cobots a Success Story. I am Ron Pubek, the Mansion Director of CPA, and I'd like to just walk you through very briefly who CPA is. Ben, would you send the next slide please? Thank you. The CPA has been the voice for contract packages and manufacturers since 1992. We engage in providing knowledge and expertise within the contact packaging industry, and we try to raise the profiles of contract packages and their capabilities. Next slide please. Okay, just a little bit of statistics. We have an RFQ tool, request for quotation tool on our websites for anybody to use if you need help. We're happy to help you. You can lose at our member directory. We have a lot of networking opportunities up to 10 events a year. We do have a lot of training opportunities for folks. And also, just to let you know, we're growing at a rate of actually 12.2% for the last five years as an industry. Next slide please. So we invite you to join us one way or the other. We, as if you're a contract package or manufacturer, you can obviously be a member, and if you're a supplier, you can be an associate member. If you are a brand or an entrepreneur, we invite you to come and visit us at PAC Expo. You can come to our annual meetings, things like that. And it's just a few of the things we have as member benefits. But again, thank you so much for attending today. All right. Ben, next slide please. All of you are on mute. If you have any questions during the webinar, you'd like to get an answer, please use the question box, type it in. We'll get as many as we can. This webinar is being recorded and will be posted on CPA website at contractpackaging.org within a few days. At the end of the webinar, you will see a link for a very brief survey. Please provide us your feedback. It's terribly important to have that. So a little bit today, I would like to introduce our presenter. I'm going to let him do some of his own introduction. Ben Courtwright is a sales development manager at Pacific Northwest Universal Robots. Ben is a subject matter expert on food and beverage and several other areas and also our subject matter expert on collaborative robots. Ben, please take it away. Thank you, Ron. And thank you everyone for attending the webinar today. I'm very excited to present this awesome case story out of Oregon with Derek. And I want to thank you, Ron, and CPA for having me here. Very excited. So we'll kick things off here. So the agenda today, we're going to briefly touch on market trends that are driving changes in packaging, who Derek is and the stakeholders involved that made this project a success, how they implemented their collaborative robots, the reasons they were successful in the return on investment Derek has seen since implementing their collaborative robots, and then where Derek is looking next in their facility for collaborative robots. About myself, Ron touched on this a little bit. I'm the sales development manager responsible for the Pacific Northwest with Universal Robots. I currently reside in Portland, Oregon. For anybody who hasn't been there, terrible place to live. Do not move there. Do not recommend it. I've been with you since early January 2018. So coming up on two years here and then major industries that I work in in the Northwest are aerospace electronics and food and beverage. So we're going to cover here the challenges of today's market environment, product variation and customization into high mix low volume. I'm sure a lot of you are seeing this from your customers or in your own facility is that you're going from a small quantity of skews to a large quantity of skews with lower volumes, which requires less fixed automation and more flexible automation. Electronics, shorter product life cycles. Everybody wants the newest iPhone. So in that trend is kind of went into other areas as well within electronics and even other industries. So always having the newest goods and everybody wants the newest thing on trend. Precision and consistency as products get smaller, you need to be more precise. You need to have the products packed in the same place, same orientation every single time with very little variation in your box or on your palette. So having a system in place that can achieve that is crucial nowadays. Customer delivery or customer trends, faster delivery. So everybody wants everything yesterday. You need to be able to scale up for large scale orders and have automation in place that can address those challenges, especially within this hiring environment, which we'll touch on with darex here shortly, which was a huge aspect for them when looking at automation and which collaborative robot to move forward with. So here, all these things together kind of add up to the following six installations into relocatable assets. So putting a collaborative robot on a movable carton, moving it between line one and line two throughout the day and having to do different tasks or 10 different lines as your needs change without human interaction into frequent interaction and shared space. So having humans work in conjunction with collaborative robots to achieve the desired throughputs. Repetitive work into frequent changes. So having lots of skew changes, product changes, line changes, having an asset that you can relocate like a flex worker along different lines to achieve your needed throughputs. Long-term ROI into short-term ROI. This is something I'll touch on with the darex case study here in a second, but we're seeing very, very short return on investments from collaborative robots in the field right now because of the relocatable aspects of them because they do not require a cage around them. So now I'm going to touch on who darex is. Darex is a small family-owned manufacturer in southern Oregon that makes drill and knife sharpeners. Roughly 100 employees, depending on the time of year, very seasonal, located in a small rural community, very, very difficult to find labor down there. It's extremely competitive. There's a strong ag industry, and then there's a large university in town as well that hires away a lot of people. So they experience a lot of turnover, which really affects them during the busy times of year, especially around Christmas and that sort of thing. And so being able to scale for those production runs has been very difficult for them. So that's what led them into looking at automation and exploring which projects they wanted to tackle so they could really start ramping up for some of these larger scale orders they're experiencing and keep on with their growth demands. The stakeholders involved in this project, kind of from the top down, you have Matthew, he's a present owner, third generation owner, needs to address labor shortage in his company and improve employee satisfaction. There's a lot of tedious jobs within that manufacturing facility, and so finding automation that's friendly towards his workers and kind of kills two birds with one stone there, addresses a labor shortage, and improves the overall satisfaction of his workers by eliminating a very tedious position and moving them to something more rewarding. John, the director of operations, is then tasked by Matthew to increase production quantities and reduce scrap, so he needs to look at automation to increase his capacity and reduce the amount of scrap parts that are coming back because of misaligned screws or not torqued properly, etc. Sam, the manufacturing engineer has a limited budget to work with and experience with automation. They had very little automation in their facility going into these projects, and so that was a large factor, and this is that they needed something that they could start small with and build their skill set from there. Project SKILF, that was identified. Matthew, the owner of a company, identified that his company is facing a critical labor shortage and needed to adopt automation to address the problem. He tasked John, the director of operations, to put together a project to reduce some of the repetitive tasks like screw driving, case erecting, case packing, palletizing, take a look at those and what is the lowest hanging fruit that they could identify, which would be a fast return on investments and a quick win for them. That's a common thing we look for when talking to companies about collaborative robots is what is the low hanging fruit application that might not have the three month return on investment that something down the line has, but is the quickest to win and you can get it in there the fastest to start making that impact immediately instead of a few months from now because there's more work that needs to be done for some of these harder projects. So from this point, John and Matthew started researching automation and what really fits their needs and their experience and something that they could take ownership of and start small with and they came across Universal Robots and got connected with the local distributor and what's nice about collaborative robots in general is that it's a very, very low entry level piece of automation. You can start very, very small, very simple and build your skill set from there and Derek's the prime example of that. You'll see here in a second that they started small with a screwdriver application and then over time with their experience of having the co-bot in there is that they were able to build into something very complex end of line of having a single robot do case directing and case packing in one cell. So really from there, it's something that's phenomenal to see that skill set build because of the ease of use that our co-bots provide in co-bots in general. And like I said, the first application that took place was the screwdriver with the UR3. So here you can see an example of it in their facility. They have the sharpener bodies that come down the line. Robot drives in three screws. It's bullfed, fairly straightforward application, but it's reduced. The main aspect here is reducing a tedious job of driving those screws in and then workers were not driving them in properly every time. So they're having a lot of issues with scrap parts and that sort of thing or those having to come back and be reworked. So putting the co-bot into the line there is completely reduced. There's scrap parts because it does it the same every single time. He's to success. After the implementation of the screwdriver application, Derek's went to the end of line packaging and case erecting. Sam, the manufacturing engineer was responsible for sourcing and implementing the automation for this project. Sam had very little experience with automation at this point, so he really relied on doing a lot of research and working with the local distribution partner for Universal Robots to learn from their experiences with other customers and what products they recommend that work in conjunction with our collaborative robots. He was able to use his experience from screwdriver to build upon a skill set with UR. He used our online academy to continue to learn how to program and get more self-sufficient on the collaborative robots. He sourced more conveyors, a checkware, and he even 3D printed his own end effector for case erecting. He even made his own infeed for case erecting. For this application, the robot was actually the easiest part of the application. The hardest part was sourcing and putting together the conveyors, the checkware, the case sealer, and building and designing the infeed for his boxes for case erecting so they're in the same repeatable position every single time. This is something that we see with most applications within the collaborative robot world is that the robot is usually the easy part. It's the stuff around it that can be a little more complicated. How your boxes are presented, what's the orientation of your product that you're putting into your case? Where does the box go after it's filled? Do you push it through a case sealer? Does a worker come over and tape it? Those aspects are usually the hurdle or what does my end effector look like to grab the product or grab the part to put into this box? Sam was able to use the UR as a master controller for the entire end of line system instead of a PLC so he was able to connect the conveyor and the case sealer to the controller and was able to have them communicate with each other to know when a box is full and to push it through what the case sealer know that a box can be coming through the case sealer. Here's an overview of the complete line here at the end of line so you can see a 5kg collaborative robot there front and center. It has a pneumatic end effector on there that Sam actually 3D printed which I was very impressed with is that it actually has a solenoid hinge on there. So that solenoid hinge allows you, if you watch the case study on YouTube, so if you go on to YouTube and look up UniversalRobotsDarex you can watch the full video here but you'll see that the robot goes over to the stack of boxes, grabs it off and that solenoid hinge there comes on to the side of the box and is able to pull the box open and then it puts it on to the slide there to close the bottom flaps of the box and then it's stationary there while boxes of products come down the line to the checkware and it's either a go or no-go. If it's a no-go, there's a light that goes on that tells the worker to come over and grab the case if it wasn't the correct weight. If not, the robot grabs it, puts it into a box once there is four into the master case. The robot then uses a solenoid to push down one of the flaps and then it pushes it through the 3M case sealer which then it goes kind of like a horseshoe down to the end of the line where it is then put on to a pallet by a worker at the end of line. This whole system, the robot was sourced very quickly the rest of the stuff was just waiting on conveyors and the case sealer and finishing up design on his in-feed for the boxes to then assemble it but it was a very fluid process and has been a very efficient line for them. The results from this line that we've seen so far at Derek's significant ROI from their packaging system. The ROI for the entire line including the UR-5 was slightly under a year which is very impressive considering all the hardware that was required for that line and the system has allowed them to scale their manufacturing from two days a week to four days a week for the designated part numbers on that line which really has allowed them in the busy times of the year to build more quickly and fill those larger orders that come in around the Christmas time and fill gaps that they have within their manufacturing process because of labor shortages. And then one of the best aspects that I like of this is that they were able to retask the employee at the end of line there to be the robot supervisor for the main day shift. There's an online academy that we have called Universal Robots Academy where you can go online and learn how to program for free. They have their workers on each shift that we're doing this. Go online, do the online academy and then the woman who won the programming contest she became the robot supervisor for that shift. This is Brittany. She's the robot supervisor. She knows how to do basic programming. She can recover the collaborative robots from a stop for any reason and get them going so you don't have to pull Sam out to work on them, very self-sufficient in that aspect. If there's anything that happens with the robots like a box is rejected on the checkware she can come over and grab it. She'll fill in and load the pallet as needed and move the pallet to the warehouse when it's full. Really it's just a flexible worker that can supervise these robots and make sure they're always running at full capacity and there's no downtime because any downtime is lost revenue for the company. What's next for Derek's? A few slides ago I showed the overall cell. At the end of line on the top of the page there you can see where the boxes are palletized. That's a key area that they're working on implementing here within the next fiscal year is implementing a large UR10, so a 10 kilogram robot to palletize onto that pallet there to eliminate Brittany having to come over and help as needed to palletize boxes once they stack up there so making it a more automated system. Then they're looking at replicating this line throughout their facility to address the continued labor shortages they're seeing within their facility. Thank you for letting me present this case study to you guys today. This has been a phenomenal application from Derek's and they're seeing continued success. I would say the key takeaways for me from Derek's is that really was having the buy-in from Matthew and John all the way down to Sam that this was something that wasn't kicked around for a long time. It was something that they executed on quickly and efficiently and didn't kick around for a year before finally pulling the trigger. They saw immediate benefits because of how quickly they moved. Now I'll take it over to Ron for any questions. Thank you, Ben. Excellent job. I appreciate that. Also, I just want to make mention, Ben gave us the case study. We focused on specific application. If you needed more information about collaborative robots in general, we decided not to do that at this webinar. We have an earlier webinar that has as plus Ben has information on their universal robot sites for that. We do have some questions coming in. It's kind of interesting. I guess the first one is one that's probably near and dear. Do I need a programmer to program these? What level of education? Give us a sense, the audience here, how sophisticated a person you need to do this programming? Yeah, absolutely. Something that's really nice about collaborative robots is that they're all inherently easy to use, at least most of them that are commercially available on the market, especially the universal robots. It's down to almost an operator level right now that you can learn how to program these. Like Derek, for example, yes, Sam did the majority of the programming on this, but using the he didn't go to any form of in-person training or anything like that. It was all something he went online and did our free online academy to learn how to program these. It takes about 90 minutes. From there, he used the skills he built online in a simulated environment to use on his robots and really be self-sufficient from there because our collaborative robots, the majority of them on the market, don't require any sort of code to program them. So it's all moving the robot by hand to different positions and setting waypoints which are locations in space. And so that lack of having the right code really brings it down to a less sophisticated level of experience required to program them. Like Brittany, for example, who's the robot supervisor, she had zero robotics experience going into it or even automation experience and she was just an operator and she was able to really build her skill set and gain a new resume item. Okay, excellent. You said these robots don't need cages. How safe are collaborative robots? And how do you say that you don't need cages? What is the mechanism to help keep them safe for workers? Yeah, absolutely. So collaborative robots are force and speed limiting robots. So within the joints of this robot, there's the servos that are always monitoring the current of the robot. So when the robot's in movement, it feels that resistance against it and it's a triggered stop that when it gets to a certain level of force against the robot, it triggers a protective stop where the robot kind of pauses and that creates a pop-up on the interface screen or the teach pendant of the robot where the programming is done letting you know the robot's in a protective stop and you have to go over and enable it to be able to continue its program from there. The robots also, they're lower payload than a lot of industrial robots that are on the market currently. So like Universal Robots, our largest robot commercially available is 10 kilograms and so that's a lot lower weight than what you see in the industrial world where it can go up to hundreds of pounds. So a lot less weight you have to worry about there and you can actually regulate on the robot how safe it is. So you can have it extremely restrictive where it takes only a brief touch to stop it or you can have it at least restrictive where it will still stop on a dime but it requires a little more force. So that allows you to really, based on your risk assessment, regulate what speeds with the robot you want to move at and what forces are required to stop it. But at the most, it's like a small bump when the robot hits you in the shoulder or in the waist, it doesn't leave a bruise or anything like that. Okay, and you got a good point. You mentioned about the size. You talked about a 5 kilogram or 10 kilogram. How do you size a robot? Is it application-based or how do you do that? Yeah, it's application-based. So there's a lot of applications that pop up, especially within the packaging world where your product might be one to two kilograms but you need our largest size, the UR10, because it's got a 1.3 meter reach. So the different size, usually as you go up in size with a robot, usually there's a bigger reach involved with it. So sometimes people are listing very light products but you need that reach to get into the case. So it's really about looking at your application and identifying how heavy is the product that we're lifting and what is the distance from where we could mount the robot to where it needs to drop the product. Okay. Here's another interesting one and it's all about technology as you start it off. What essentially is the life cycle of a robot? When do they become obsolete? You've got to replace a robot if I spend the money for this one. How long can I expect it to last before I have to replace it? Yeah, absolutely. So most, or I will say all robot companies on the market don't publish any sort of meantime to failure or anything like that because it varies so much from application to application across the board. So our robots are specced and rated in designs for 35,000 hours of continuous use. So that's what they're specced for, but if you're using our robot 24 hours a day, seven days a week with full 10 kilograms and very fast, jerky, high accelerations, you're probably going to experience a shorter life than somebody that's using it five days a week, slower motions, lower payloads. So it really just depends on the amount of abuse the robot's seeing. It's hard to give an exact number, but that's something where working with us in local distribution, we can help make sure your program is running efficiently as possible to minimize the amount of stress that the joints are experiencing. Here's another good question, and you know this one was common. What kind of budgets do you need to have to implement, let's say, a basic collaborative robotic program, kind of like what Derek's did, or something similar? Can you give us any guidelines on that? Yeah, I can't first say how much Derek's line costs them because I don't have the exact numbers right now on how much the case sealer and the checkware and those conveyors cost them. But I would say if you're doing a similar packaging application with a UR5, a five kilogram robot, I would say budgeting 60 to 70,000 would probably be sufficient just for the robot, the hardware, and potentially the checkware plus conveyor there to get that set up. Okay, that's a good number. Thank you, appreciate that. Okay, that's another one here. Oh yeah, how in the word of automation, that's where we kind of started this whole thing off in automation. Where do you make the judgment to automate, let's say a machine that you have versus putting in a robot? Is there a template, a worksheet, or something you guys have, or somebody has to say, hey, this is when you can automate the machine versus putting in a collaborative robot? Yeah, absolutely. I would say the easiest way to identify it is to look at your, especially within the packaging world, look at your throughput. If your throughput is very low mixed, high volume, you would probably want to go towards a fixed asset at that point that's dedicated machine in the floor, can just do a couple of products very, very quickly. If you have a higher mixer, you need something more flexible with lower product volume so you can have a little bit slower speed. That's where I go towards a collaborative robot where you can have the flexibility of having to move a little slower, but it gives you the capability to move it around your facility and have it work on different lines and different tasks. Okay, all right, here's a good question. Somebody's interested in kind of getting more information and getting started on collaborative robots. How does somebody get started? What's the jump off point and what are the information they need to get started? Yeah, absolutely. So I would really recommend going on to the Universal Robots website. We have a lot of good white pages on there with different information on how to get started. It's all right on the homepage, how to get started. You know, hurdles that people have had to overcome within different industries like packaging, palletizing, machine tending, that sort of thing. And then after reading those, if that's something that interests you, either go online and do our free online academy or even reach out to us directly via the website. There's, you know, put in your contact information. We'll contact you and chat to you about your application and, you know, needs and that sort of thing and move from there. Okay, great. And you talked about the online training. There's a question here. How do you access the online training? Is it, you know, once you become a customer, you get access to the training systems or what tells a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So the wonderful thing about the online academy is that you could go online and you don't have to be a customer. You could go online and do it for free today. You know, tens of thousands of people have done it worldwide. It's great. It takes about 90 minutes. And we actually have two different portions of the academy now. We have the basic academy that takes you literally from getting the robot out of the box to doing programming on a simulated pick and place off a conveyor line in 90 minutes. And then we have a protract, which teaches you how to do a little more complicated things like polishing or palletizing and that sort of thing, all within a simulated environment. So those skills you learn, once you go hands-on in the real life with a robot live, everything's going to look familiar to you and you're going to be able to hit the ground running. So it's completely free to do at any time for people. Just go onto our website, Universal Robots Academy, very straightforward. Excellent. Excellent. Well, that's good advice. We'll have to make sure we collect those links on the follow-up. So Ben, thank you very much. Definitely appreciate your time today. Thank all of you who are attending the webinar. We definitely appreciate it. Again, there will be a short survey that comes out as soon as you log off today. We close out the webinar. Please take it. It's about one or two questions and we'll answer it. Ben, thank you again. And good day, everybody. Have a good one. Thank you very much, everyone.