In Short
A worldwide cosmetics company behind such well-known brands as Sally Hansen, Rimmel and CoverGirl. At the company’s factory, eight Universal Robots on four mobile carts now automate the picking and packing of products at the powder presses. The mobile solution delivers $500,000 in annual savings while improving both quality inspection and the employee work environment.

The business transformation
For the project manager, the issue was clear: “We currently have twelve presses, and the challenge with automation is always how do you—in a cost-effective manner—automate such a large operation?” they had multiple reasons for automating, including meeting the company’s drive for increased efficiency as well as addressing the repetitive nature of the task, which was not ergonomically friendly for human operators. This was a task that the company had previously looked into automating, but found that the technology available at the time wasn’t up to the complexity of the application.

the project manager brought the problem to the owner of the integration firm who says, “The challenge for me was to try to determine how I could build a robotic system that was mobile enough to meet their automation needs while still being cost-effective enough to meet their budgetary needs.” Traditional industrial robots are not easily moved around due to safety regulations, which meant that the company would have to permanently place a robot at each of the 12 presses. This was not within budget.

The Solution

“They’re lightweight, they’re easy to use, they’re low voltage, and certainly could work together in the same environment as individuals, so we decided to give the Universal Robots a shot.”

The application involves picking up “godets”—metal pans containing powder cosmetics products—and placing them on trays packaged in boxes and sent to a different department for final processing. In the presses, powder is pushed into the godets, which then travel under a 3D profiler head from Cognex for surface inspection and to measure the volume of powder in the pan. If the godets pass inspection, a UR3 cobot picks them up in groups of two or four, depending on the product, and places them on a tray. When the tray is full, a UR5 cobot picks the tray up and moves it to one of five case locations and places the tray in the case. The UR5 cobot then moves to where empty trays are stored, picks up a tray and places it back in the tray staging area, waiting for the next one to drop in front of the UR3 while it’s loading.

Fast ROI, improved work environment and quality
For this collaborative automation project, the company is projected to save half a million dollars annually going forward. That’s a significant return on investment, but they have seen other benefits as well.

The area where the robots work is dusty and noisy, with heavy vibration from the large presses. Now that the robots are working next to these sources, they are able to move employees farther away from this environment and redeploy them to less repetitive and more interesting tasks. the project manager explains, “Once this project is fully completed and running three shifts, five days a week, with four carts, there are going to be thirteen fewer employees working in that area. That’s a significant change for the organization, with a lot of efficiency improvements, and the team’s very excited about that.”