What changed when a Washington machine shop filled its night shift with a cobot

October 1, 2026 · 3 min read

Toolcraft Inc. of Monroe, Washington won a medical device order that needed round the clock production and could not hire a third shift. A cobot now tends a vertical machining center. Weekly output rose from 255 to 370 parts and production cost fell 23 percent, as reported by trade press and the vendor.

The short answer

A 25 to 50 person precision shop added unattended hours to a machine that already had the work, and the published result was a 43 percent throughput increase and a 23 percent drop in production cost, with a payback of about 12 months claimed by the vendor and repeated by the trade article. The account below comes from trade press coverage, so read the numbers as reported, not as audited results.

What the job looked like before

Toolcraft machines medical device components. A large order arrived that needed production around the clock, and local unemployment sat near 3 percent, so a third shift was not available to hire. The part ran a three operation cycle on a vertical machining center, with two vise fixtures and a fourth axis rotary fixture, and an operator loaded every one.

What they put in

A Universal Robots UR5e collaborative arm with a PHD pneumatic gripper, pneumatic fixtures and machine door actuators wired through the cobot's inputs and outputs, and a rinse and dry station the robot moves finished parts through. The machining cycle runs 56 minutes, of which about 6 minutes is robot activity, which is what lets one arm cover a long unattended stretch.

What changed, in their numbers

Weekly output rose from 255 to 370 parts, a 43 percent increase, reported by trade press and published by the vendor. Production cost fell 23 percent, also reported by both. Payback is given as about 12 months, which is a vendor claim repeated by the trade article. The arm's 30 micron repeatability is cited because the part carried threaded features across three sequential fixtures. Purchase price was not published.

What this does not tell you

It does not tell you the cell cost, so the 12 month payback cannot be rebuilt from the article. It does not tell you how the shop handles chips, coolant and alarms through an unattended night, which no cobot solves on its own. And it is a high volume repeat part with stable fixturing, the easy end of machine tending. A job shop with weekly changeovers should expect to spend time re-teaching and swapping fixtures that this shop did not.

What to verify in your own plant

Whether your machine can be fitted with an automatic door and actuated workholding, because that plumbing was integral here. Whether your cycle is long enough for one arm to buy meaningful unattended time; a two minute cycle is a different cell. Whether your part's true positioning needs are inside cobot repeatability. And whether the machine you want to automate is the one with the backlog.

Sources: https://www.mmsonline.com/articles/fill-the-night-shift-with-a-machine-tending-cobot and https://www.universal-robots.com/case-stories/toolcraft-inc/

If you want to see how your own machine compares, describe it to Joe, the concierge on this site. It takes about ten minutes, it is free, and the honest answer is sometimes that a different machine should go first.

Related on this site

The cell works because the robot is busy 6 minutes out of a 56 minute cycle. Long cycles, stable fixturing and an automatic door are the preconditions, not the robot brand.

Put it to the test on your own job

Tell Joe what you are running and he will apply this to your numbers, including telling you when a robot is the wrong answer.

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