Robots ready to reduce labour costs

CNC machining equipment and robotics supplier Okuma Australia now has an exclusive distribution agreement for Australia and New Zealand with Belgium robotics firm Robojob.

“After researching the markets we found great similarities between our market in Western Europe and those in Australia and New Zealand,” said RoboJob CEO, Helmut de Roovere.

“In Western Europe we have similarly high labour rates and a large number of small to medium sized job shops. Our own manufacturing experiences led us to pursue all the available days in a year for production and even to extend our operations to a second and third shift.

“When we analysed our employee structures we found that like most businesses, there are repetitive and creative tasks. We wanted to take people doing repetitive tasks and give them new creative roles in our operation.

“This boosted our planning, innovation, output and work satisfaction enormously. The changes we initiated using newly developed RoboJob technology delivered us massive gains in efficiency, productivity and business returns.”

Roovere says that while businesses throughout Australia and New Zealand have the capacities and skills to thrive, continuing increases in the areas labour costs add pressures at a time when global benchmarks are rapidly re-defining manufacturing costs.

RoboJob business development manager Jelle de Roovere says the great advantage of RoboJob is its complete flexibility and ease of use and setting.

“We developed our own interactive operator interface screen that only requires the customer to input the main features of the job, a procedure that can be done in a matter of minutes.”