Special Coverage
Management Briefing Seminars
TRAVERSE CITY, MI – That big idea may have considerable merit, but getting it through the maze of big-company bureaucracy can be time consuming.
MIGfast Pty. Ltd., based in Dandenong, Australia, near Melbourne, has developed robot welding tip technology that presumably provides numerous advantages over conventional devices, MIGfast CEO Adrian Boden reports at the Management Briefing Seminars here.
Among the advantages cited by Boden are a 7% to 19% reduction in cycle time; 3% to 21% reduction in wire usage and 26% to 30% saving in shielding gas. Welding tip life is boosted by four to five times, he adds, and energy use is slashed 24% to 25% – all without additional capital investment.
Those statistics would seem irresistible to the folks who man the legions of robots used in automotive manufacturing, but Boden says the big guys drag their feet.
“The bigger the company the more resistance there is,” he says. “When we run a trial and establish the productivity improvements, 75% of small customers convert within four weeks” while “100% of the big companies take 20 to 35 weeks.”
