Technibilt's new robot welds 24 parts per hour.

Technibilt boosts output by adding welding robots.

Technibilt/Cari-All Ltd. (www.technibilt.com) produced about 150,000 metal shopping carts in 1990 with 350 production employees. Fourteen years later, the company produced 450,000 carts in 2004 and cut its employment level to about 195 workers. The company's increase in production accompanied by an increase in the quality of its carts and a reduction in its costs were the results of a plant expansion and redesign that included the addition of welding and material handling robots.

Alan Deal, manager of Technibilt/Cari-All's Newton, N.C., plant said the company was looking to reduce costs and improve productivity when it decided to expand and to redesign its production process.

"We're doing more shopping carts than ever before but with fewer people. The use of robotic automation, improvements in machine layout and work flow, elimination of unnecessary material handling and other shop floor waste, and improved employee efficiencies have allowed us to remain competitive," Deal says.

Technibilt manufactures the primary parts of the carts — handles, gates, frames, baskets and grills. Grills are the lower trays on shopping carts that are used to hold the dog food and beer.

"Most of the parts we make involve resistance welding wire and MIG welding tubing to flat steel," says Deal. For the smaller carts, the company uses MIG welding robots to weld each handle, basket and frame together as one unit. This unit is placed with the gate and grill on one rack of the powdercoating line. As these parts come off the line, they are assembled along with the wheels and other components.

Technibilt installed the first of four ArcWorld 1000 arc welding work cells in 1998, featuring an SK16 robot. Technibilt later expanded to 347,000 square feet of manufacturing, assembly and storage space, and added three additional work cells, two with extended SK16-6 robots and one with an EA1900 Expert Arc welding robot. Motoman Inc. (www.motoman.com) supplied the arc welding work cells and robots.

The company installed five SK120 robots and one UP130 robot for material handling. Now it can manufacture different basket models and produce grills simultaneously.

Deal said the first three robots improved productivity and quality, and the additional robots allowed the company to produce welds that older robots could not do, while increasing production speeds nearly 20 percent for some parts.

"Our business is somewhat seasonal, so different products hit heavy at certain times of the year. Parts are batch run and changeover is manual," Deal says, noting that the company had a production run of about five months for one model of its shopping carts set up on two lines. The line with the newer robot was making nearly 3,000 parts per week, roughly 200 parts per shift, while the line with an older robot was making about 136 parts per day. Production on the line with the new robot is onethird higher than on the line with the old robot.

Additionally, Deal notes that the quality of short welds — 0.75-in. to 1-in. long — produced on both new and older robot production lines is about the same as on manual welding lines, and that quality on longer welds is higher with the robots. Deal said his company saw sales increase about 25 percent early in 2005, and that it expected to ship 500,000 carts for the year.