Originally published in The Fabricator
Written by: Dan Davis

PMI leans on its metal processing know-how and automation to stay on top of its opportunities.

A collaborative robot, or “cobot,” welded this part at PMI LLC in Bloomer, Wis. In fact, Hirebotics, the company behind this automated welding cell, has updated the cobot’s welding capabilities after receiving feedback from PMI’s robotics team. These updates are delivered to the cobots via the cloud.

Eric Lewis is the plant manager for PMI LLC, a service center/stamper/fabricator in Bloomer, Wis. PMI needs manufacturing talent. Situated between the Twin Cities in Minnesota and the large Chicago metropolitan area, PMI finds itself in the middle of plenty of economic opportunities. That’s why it has been successful in diversifying its customer base over the years, serving the appliance, automotive, defense, and energy industries.

As these companies have grown, so has PMI. Over the last couple of years, the company has seen 10 percent year-over-year growth, according to PMI President Chris Conard. Today the manufacturer has about 145 employees; three years ago it was only a 70-employee operation.

PMI officials reached out to Hirebotics, Nashville, Tenn., to help integrate some material handling cobots into a stamping line for generator parts. The cobots would help to free up some labor from the task of loading parts into a press, removing them, and loading another blank into the press.

“This type of investment is important because it helps us to keep up with work even as the market is getting tight for labor,” Conard said. “You don’t want to have to say no to a customer because you can’t take on their work.”

Hirebotics is giving companies like PMI the chance to dabble in automation without having to make a large investment in equipment and adding robotic specialists to the payroll. The company rents the cobots and helps to set them up for the particular application. Since this spring PMI has been using two of the cobots on the generator stamping line.

The cobots feed and remove generator parts from the dies of a 400-ton Danly press and 250-ton Warco press. Instead of the stamping line operating with four employees, only two are needed.

Joe Holloway, senior vice president, Red-D-Arc Inc., said his company had been watching the welding labor shortage trend develop. The thought process evolved after Holloway read about Hirebotics in industry trade journals in 2017. Hirebotics had a good control system, but it had not been adapted to welding. Air Liquide’s engineering talent helped develop recipes that would allow the easy-to-program cobots to start laying beads. The BotX Welder was born.

“We wanted to make it as simple as possible for people to use,” Holloway said. “What we’ve done is develop this library of welding recipes that not only have the voltage and wire feed speed for whatever the application is, but it also controls the robotic arm as far as travel speed and the proper angle of the torch.”

PMI decided to rent two BotX Welder packages, which included a Universal Robots UR10e cobot arm, a connector to the cloud-based internet, a Miller Electric welding power source, a wire feeder, a robotic gas metal arc gun, a modular welding table, and the Hirebotics app and software to control the system.

Erik Larson, PMI’s vice president of operations, said a lead from the stamping area, who had worked with the Hirebotics cobots, was assigned to work with the welding cobots. He had no welding experience. “When you watch them program one of these cobots, it’s move the arm, press a button, move the arm, press a button. You don’t need welding experience to get it working,” Larson said.

Lewis said the cobots have improved the quality of welded parts because of their ability to deliver the same welds repeatedly, part after part. PMI has about 50 different parts stored in the control software. When the cobots aren’t welding, PMI isn’t paying for their use.

“We have read that the number of available workers between 18 and 65 is going to continue to go down over the next decade. So our assumption is that we’ll be fighting even harder for that labor pool as we go along,” Conard said. “The introduction of automation like this helps us become less dependent on trying to find the right people. We can still grow and offer additional capacity to our customers when needed.”