The benefits of a reducing the number of suppliers are widely recognized across manufacturing and industry, with savings including lower development costs and faster time-to-market for new products.  Mitsubishi Electric argues the same benefits can be realised by machine builders of all sizes.

Typically, the overall cost of design, programming, development, assembly and testing of a new machine far outweighs the purchase cost of the individual components. If the individual cost of the components is comparable across a range of different vendors, then the vendor that offers the greatest savings in terms of design, integration and assembly, also offers the greatest cost benefit to the machine builder.

Common engineering software suite

Mitsubishi Electric is in the unique position of being able to deliver own manufactured inverters, servos, PLCs, motion, CNC controllers, HMIs and robot solutions that are totally integrated, this means that when used on a common automation platform they are largely plug-and-play. Programmed, commissioned and operated using the iQ-Works engineering software suite they offer huge benefits in terms of convenience and speed of set-up when applied together.

As one of the world’s largest suppliers of industrial robots with payloads up to of 15kg, robots are a big differentiator for Mitsubishi Electric. Manufacturing engineers are often surprised by their low package cost, and ease of integration. Robots are driving significant sales growth as producers look for productivity improvements.

The benefits of this macro scale investment are effectively then transferred to any machine built using those components, especially when all the components are easy to integrate and work synchronously. Controlling machining, processing, packaging and pick-and-place tasks – while managing a complete assembly line, including safety systems and the interface between machines and operators – has never been more achievable from one source of supply.

Maintaining quality and performance

For the machine builder, reducing cost without sacrificing quality or performances is extremely attractive. A reduction in engineering design and programming time is an area where significant savings can be made.

Mitsubishi Electric’s integrated solutions deliver a combination of control, robotics, and safety, all on a common PLC rack. Not only does this offer many technical advantages in terms of speed of data exchange between these various control aspects but also delivers additional hardware consolidation benefits, which means more savings.

Recognising the benefits of an integrated product offering Mitsubishi’s e-Factory Alliance partners brings a range of best-in-class devices to make a total plant end to end solution is available from Mitsubishi Electric.

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