Robot welding: More efficiency for programming and equipment fabrication

The forklift manufacturer Crown relies heavily on robotic welding automation for production of their equipment in the Roding (Germany) facility. The results for increased productivity and weld quality are quite impressive and therefore the number of automated welding systems has continued to expand over recent years. As a result, the addition of more robots to production requires the addition of more experienced programming personnel.

Bottlenecks can occur when robot cells are taken out of production in order to program additional part variants or new part assemblies. Looking towards the elimination of these inefficiencies in lost production time, Crown has now begun to replace the time-consuming manual teaching of the robot systems with simulation-based offline programming for tool path generation.

For this, they rely on the FASTSUITE Edition 2 software and the CENIT team!

 Crown is one of the five largest forklift manufacturers in the world. The US-based, family-owned company has a global production, sales, and service network with 19 manufacturing sites around the world and more than 500 sales offices in 84 countries.

As a customer-oriented innovation leader, Crown regularly sets trends in the field of material flow solutions. The development process involves technology challenges from the beginning of work to a fully developed product design. Crown has a "human-centered design" approach. Each forklift is designed to improve productivity, operator comfort, and safety at the customer's site, ultimately optimizing the total cost of ownership of the fleet. Crown has made a strong reputation for itself in industrial design and has received several awards for it.

For the production of forklifts, it is critical to develop robust and durable products that meet the customer’s high demands for quality, ergonomics, and reliability, as well as meeting safety-relevant requirements.

High quality standards based on a customer-oriented focus are met by Crown’s high vertical integration: up to 85 percent of the components are produced in-house.

Those who visit the Roding facility will get an impression of how this orientations is implemented. Crown employees are justifiably proud of their excellence in manufacturing that is built around a unifying team effort.

Crown has been producing forklifts in the Roding facility since 1986. Over the course of more than 30 years, this has repeatedly been the starting point for innovations in manufacturing. In this respect, it is not surprising that Mads Adreasen, Director of Manufacturing, has pushed ahead with the introduction of welding robots for his site. Today there are several complex robot systems with up to 13 axes in the production floor.

New ideas are already emerging in the Roding facility today. With FASTSUITE, Crown has a software solution that they can grow with, it is open and scalable and can be customized to their future needs. Together with the FASTSUITE team, this is an ideal first step for a company with a strong industries 4.0 vision. Read more in FASTSUITE EXPERTISE.