Technology Blog
Unlock Hidden Opportunity Costs While Maximizing Your Labor The Case for Automation
Concluding our blog series on how automated coolant delivery systems can improve your return on investment (ROI), we turn now to opportunity costs.
While it’s true you can calculate ROI based on all the topics covered in our previous blog posts — from productivity gains to less machine stoppages — there’s also a hidden opportunity cost associated with taking workers away from more productive activities each time they need to dump coolant into the sump. And these interrupted minutes per sump per shift add up.
Adding Up the Interrupted Minutes
Let’s break down some of the numbers based on a machine shop that runs 19 total shifts per week — 15 shifts between Monday and Friday, as well as four additional shifts over the weekend. Now, let’s say each shift loses 8 minutes of time per sump in order for workers to monitor, mix and tend to coolant issues. In a shop with 50 sumps, this lost time is the same as having 40 workers leave 10 minutes early every shift. You wouldn’t let that happen in your shop, would you?
Maximize Your Labor
The good news is you can virtually eliminate these interrupted minutes with automatic coolant refill systems like our FullShop™ Automated Coolant Delivery System. By automatically delivering top-off coolant to your machine tools, this system frees up your skilled CNC machinists, enabling them to focus on their craft without serving on the usual bucket brigade.
At the same time, you can unlock even greater opportunity costs by regaining the minutes lost to manual coolant delivery each shift. You can place your workers in jobs that produce greater value and unlock even greater productivity levels.
Peter Zelinski of Modern Machine Shop magazine said it best: “Automation is not a replacement or an alternative for people. The case for automation really has more to do with augmenting, expanding and amplifying what those high-value people can do… So find every repetitive task that people like that might do and find ways to automate them to set these people free for the higher-value work — of which there's plenty to do.”
To learn more about FullShop, please download our data sheet.
