Kawasaki Robotics and SynthoTec scoop industry award

Kawasaki Robotics has won the prestigious Supplier Partnership – Ancillary Machinery Award at the 2019 Plastics Industry Awards.

The Award reflected the partnership which Kawasaki Robotics and leading plastics moulder SynthoTec enjoyed, as the latter set about upgrading parts of its production process.

Located in Worcestershire, SynthoTec is one of Europe’s premier producers of injection-moulded ultra-high precision components, and the company has recently installed a Kawasaki RS20N robot, which has allowed it to boost production, cut costs, and achieve a significant reduction in waste material in one of its most important manufacturing processes.

Jon Hart, Project Engineer at SynthoTec, said: “We had a detailed list of objective which we shared with Kawasaki Robotics early on. We needed to achieve significant cost savings across our demoulding cells from improved throughput.”

“We also wanted to reduce the physical size of each production cell, because floor space is at a premium, and we needed a robot that was straightforward to install, programme, and manage ourselves.”

“Additionally, we had a desire to do our own training and systems integration on the new robot, to evolve our own way of doing things, and we wanted a robot supplier that recognised our existing in-house skills, was prepared to brief us accordingly, and then let us get on with the job of installing, commissioning, and using the chosen equipment ourselves.”

Ian Hensman, Kawasaki Robotics Sales Manager, said: “SynthTec were clear from the start about both their application objectives and their desire to manage the project to completion themselves.”

“It was immediately obvious to us that we could be completely confident in their ability to commission and install one of our robots, with the team simply providing the equipment, together with oversight and detailed infill, as and when required.”

“It is unusual for a customer to want to do this themselves, as our many integrators will confirm. We were delighted that the SynthoTec engineering team proved to be more than capable of fully integrating our robot into their production processes, with minimal requests to us for clarification and guidance.”

“Between us, we took this project from ‘first meeting’ to ‘up and running’ in just 25 weeks. Kawasaki Robotics is delighted to have received this Supplier Partnership Award because it typifies so many of the applications we work on with our customers. We see this Award as a credit to the team at SynthoTec as much as we do to ourselves.”