Aerospace shop doubles glue cell output and cuts scrap from 15 percent to 3 percent

Precision metal and plastic components and assemblies for the aerospace industry · Pick and place · Vendor published

The job

Tool Gauge in Tacoma, Washington ran an assembly where operators picked end caps for a plastic extruded panel and dispensed glue into a channel so narrow that the shop was seeing hand fatigue and injury risk, along with high scrap. Four operators produced about 200 units a day. A UR5 now picks each end cap, carries it through a glue dispenser, and places it into a clamping actuator on a table, where one operator inspects the gluing and removes the part. Separately, a UR3 picks easily damaged copper machined parts off a CNC chute on a proximity sensor signal, dips them in a rinse bath, holds them in front of a dryer, then boxes them into a grid using the built in palletizing wizard, freeing a journeyman machinist who had been doing nothing but that.

The shop

25 to 50 employees, published-by-vendor as a range rather than an exact number. Shift pattern: not published. Context published by the vendor: the general manager had been looking to hire as many as 100 new employees who were not available in the local labor market.

The equipment

Universal Robots UR5 and UR3. Glue dispenser, clamping actuator table, rinse bath, dryer, and cardboard cell boxes loaded with the UR palletizing wizard. Proximity sensor wired into a 12 volt digital input on the UR3 controller to trigger the pick. Grippers and end of arm tooling: not published. Vision system: none used on either robot.

The published numbers

Glue cell output: from about 200 units per day with four operators to 400 units per day with one operator plus the UR5, published-by-vendor. Scrap on the glue application: from 15 percent to 3 percent, published-by-vendor. Labor cost savings: up to 75 percent, published-by-vendor. One time saving on the CNC unload job: 9,000 dollars on the very first order, published-by-vendor. Payback: expected under one year for both robots, published-by-vendor and explicitly worded as an expectation, against an initial internal assumption of three to four years. Hiring avoided: the need for 100 new employees cut in half, published-by-vendor. Injury claims: a reduction in state Labor and Industry claims is asserted with no figure, published-by-vendor. Cycle times: not published. Cell cost: not published. Uptime: not published.

Where a source did not publish a figure, this entry says so rather than guessing.

What we would check before believing it applies to you

The glue cell has the most useful before and after in this whole set because both sides are stated: four operators at about 200 units a day became one operator plus a robot at 400 a day, roughly an eightfold change in units per labor hour. The scrap move from 15 percent to 3 percent is the number to chase, since on a narrow bead in a tight channel most scrap is human tremor and fatigue and a robot removes that variable outright, but you must measure your own baseline first, because a shop already sitting at 4 percent has essentially nothing to recover. Read the payback claim carefully: it is written as expected payback under a year, not measured payback, and with no cell cost published you cannot reconstruct the arithmetic. An operator still inspects and unloads every glued part, so this reduced a four person station to a one person station rather than removing the station, and any similar quote should be priced that way. The UR3 job is the more copyable one for a typical job shop, and note it needed no vision at all, just a proximity sensor and a repeatable chute.

Sources