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Cobots improve quality, production speed and work environment

Izoelektro d.o.o.

Small company implements a UR collaborative robot to expand production and comprehensive test processes in cost-efficient manner.

Izoelektro d.o.o. is a rapidly growing manufacturer from Slovenia (EU) that provides products intended for maintenance, refurbishment and set-up of electro-energy systems. The company has only 8 employees and was looking for a way to increase production and improve quality assurance. The results were evident quickly and plans are underway to diversify operations utilizing more Universal Robots.

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In short

The business transformation

“The biggest challenge for us is to fulfil our customers’ demands in a cost efficient manner,” says Tadej Kovač, development manager in Izoelektro. “ Worldwide companies are optimizing their production processes so we started considering automatization as well. Robots are the future and especially in electric components manufacturing where we face strong every-day competition, so we started looking for a suitable robotic solution.”

Due to its small size, the company cannot afford a traditional industrial automation system. Collaborative robots can offer many different and more affordable options. “Universal Robots brand is recognized worldwide, they offer good quality for a very good price, so in the end it was not a difficult decision,” adds Kovač.

Izoelektro d.o.o.

Industry Electronics and Technology

Country Europe

Number of Employees 5-25

Cobots used UR5

Video — UR5 robot, Izoelektro d.o.o., Slovenia

Safety first

The company conducted a risk assessment of the robot installation which concluded that no safety caging was necessary due to the robot’s collaborative nature and built-in safety features. Despite having no prior experience with robots, the first project deployment was completed in less than two weeks from the cobot’s delivery. The technical support provided by Universal Robots helped the quick implementation.

Flexible automation

The first project included two operation tasks as product routine testing processes for low voltage surge arresters and medium voltage surge arresters where the robot was applied. A future application is to include product routine testing of tensile load for tension composite insulators and post line composite insulators. The company is also looking for the robot to assemble the core of the tension and post line composite insulators.

A helping hand

The UR5 cobot now works in product testing, a time consuming process high on the company’s wishlist to automate. Using a UR+ enabled gribber from Robotiq, the robot took over the most repetitive jobs leaving employees to concentrate on more value-added tasks.

“At first we didn’t have any experience but the technical support sessions that Universal Robots offered us made everything much easier. There are still many functions where we could use more robots and we definitely will in the future,” says Kovač.

In our company we all see and feel changes of our industry that focuses more and more on automating production processes. Alhough we are a small company, we did not want to stay behind this trend and when we met Universal Robots, we knew this was the right solution for us. After an easy implementation we started to use the UR5 robot and quickly got results: better quality, higher productivity and improved work environment for our employees.

TADEJ KOVAČ , Development manager, Izoelektro.

The benefits

The robot made a huge difference in Izoelektro production. A robot can work for eight hours straight in one shift with consistant efficiency, which cannot be achieved by any person. The production and testing time of each product is much faster, reducing the overall production cost as human errors are eliminated.

The UR helped to shorten the production time and costs. Other important benefits include an increase of product quality, productivity growth, and improved safety conditions for employees. The bottom line is the fast ROI: Izoelektro estimates the time for repayment will be between 18 and 24 months.