Business Considerations When Investing in Robotic Welding

Robotic welding is the largest segment of robotic automation and has been for decades. Despite its relative maturity, robotic welding technology continues to gain popularity and widespread adoption because of the productivity and return on investment (ROI) benefits it reliably delivers.

As robotic welding has grown more popular, the price of pre-engineered robotic welding work cells has dropped, pressuring more and more manufacturers to invest in robotic welding. Whether it’s your first time automating, or you need to replace existing robotic systems, justifying the costs is a critical part of investing in robotic welding.

What Do You Stand to Lose by Not Investing in Robotic Welding Work Cells?

What you stand to lose is just as important as what you stand to gain. Most people are quick to assess the benefits of robotic welding at an operational level, but from a business perspective, there are other considerations. For example, could a disruptive competitor invest in automation to gain a competitive edge?

If competitors gain a significant advantage in automation, they’ll widen their profit margins, increase their throughput and potentially undercut your prices. Since robots are far more consistent than manual processes, they may even see higher customer retention rates due to the improved quality of products. There’s a lot to consider when you think about competitors gaining an edge through automation.

What Do You Stand to Gain by Investing in Robotic Welding Work cells?

As mentioned above, robotic welding can improve throughput, profitability, and productivity. These are some of the core benefits of robotic automation. Robots, when properly programmed, are inherently more consistent, have higher uptimes and are cheaper than manual welding processes. But there are other benefits.

One overlooked benefit of robotic welding work cells is their potential to gather deep production data and deliver it in a digestible way for analysis. This type of data is impossible to gather with manual or outdated automation processes. Visibility into production processes leads the way to continuous optimization and steadily improving productivity over the lifetime of the system.

There are many benefits of robotic welding and these must be considered before investing. There are also a lot of things a company stands to lose if they don’t invest in robotic welding, at least from a competitive point of view.

Robotic welding is gaining popularity and has already enjoyed widespread adoption. As more manufacturers adopt the latest robotic welding technology, it pressures everyone else to keep up. Weighing the business considerations when investing in robotic welding is a key part of this step and can set you up for success.

To take a deeper dive into the decision-making process, download our free ebook, “6 Business Considerations When Investing in Robotic Welding.”