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Since many of us have been confined to our homes a lot recently, it’s likely that you’ve spent some time thinking about how to improve your house. Maybe you’ve looked at some of those glossy lifestyle magazines with impossibly large kitchens.
If you’re hankering after the ideal kitchen – with spacious cabinets, self-closing drawers and granite surfaces – moving house is probably not your first thought. Upping sticks comes at a high financial cost, not to mention a significant amount of upheaval for the whole family.
You may consider hiring an experienced artisan to design and build a bespoke kitchen for you. Hmm…that’s also rather expensive. Instead, you will probably go to a specialist kitchen retailer to choose what you want from a wide range of stylish modular components – at a fraction of the cost but still delivering an aesthetically pleasing and efficient solution.
The same logic can be applied to tire factory automation. While moving your operation to a greenfield site can be an attractive option – giving you completely free rein in the design of your production process – it’s also an expensive one. And not just in financial terms, as you may well lose some of your experienced workforce in the process.
Building constraints
However, staying put at your brownfield site will probably mean there are some physical restrictions in your buildings that may prove a challenge when introducing automation to your material flow. Many existing factories were designed according to criteria from a bygone era, when intralogistics was planned around largely manual processes.
Just like houses, no two brownfield plants are the same. And, like some residential buildings, some brownfields are even protected due to their historical or cultural significance. This is not a problem, however, if your automation is modular. Tailored plans are generally costly but, if unique solutions can be created from standard modules, the cost drops dramatically.
Modular automation
Enter Dream Factory, our modular automation solution for end-to-end logistics in tire plants – from raw material handling and component preparation to tire building, green tire storage & retrieval, curing, finishing, warehousing and dispatch.
With Dream Factory, you can create a unique solution from standard modules, enabling older tire plants to stay competitive through streamlined material flow for production flexibility and maximum output, along with full traceability and real-time quality control.
Want to discover how to automate your brownfield?
Author Anna-Mari Vuollet