Overcoming Automation Challenges at Lupton & Place
For over a century, Lupton & Place have been at the leading edge of the European aluminium die casting industry. They continually invest in equipment and plant expansions to remain competitive and guarantee open capacity supply for more demanding projects. Capable of producing over 5 million castings per year, Lupton & Place turned to automation to support their business growth.
With their mind on lean manufacturing, Lupton & Place are acutely focused on automation across their factory. While having developed a high degree of automation in their high-pressure foundry with industrial robots, this type of automation was not well-suited to their machine shop. With their factory landlocked in a residential area, they are limited on space with no opportunities for expansion and the safety risks of robots made them an unviable solution.
Experiencing significant business growth in recent years, with machines sales rising exponentially, Lupton & Place chose to integrate cobots in their machine shop to support production. However, their initial cobot supplier left them with a number of problems and ill-equipped to get the most out of their cobot.
Lupton & Place were first introduced to Cobots Online to help develop their initial automation project and overcome a number of issues they were facing. Understanding the challenges they were facing first-hand, the Cobots Online team built a relationship of trust with Lupton & Place over a number of years, leading to further areas of automation to be identified.
The installation of their first two CoboTends saw significant increases to OEE and high levels of spindle up-time, with continuity and repeatability of production 24 hours a day. Shortly after, a third cobot, CoboTower, was integrated with bespoke end of arm tooling and parts to support a specific application. Lupton & Place’s continued success with cobots has led them to order a fourth CoboTend, with ongoing after care support provided from the whole Cobots Online team.
Contact our team to reach your full potential with CoboTend and CoboTower.