When a company in the manufactory industry makes costly investments, it's important that these are used as much as possible. The company in this case claims that their invested robot cell, with CNC machine isn't used enough. The questions here are: How can we improve the use of the robot cell? Which products are appropriate for the production in the robot cell?

As a method to come to a conclusion, an analysis has been made over the manufactured products. And also interviews with machine operators and the production management. Our work has also been based on literature studies,   because the production moment has been compared with models from Lean Production theories.     

The analysis shows that there are some limitations in the robot cell, which means that there are several demands that have to be fulfilled. From the investigated material our conclusion is that many products don't keep up with following demands: length, surface, tolerance dimensions, and shape. As a result of this, there are some products that can´t be manufactured in the robot cell, and therefore has to be produced in the ordinary CNC machine group.

Interviews have declared that there doesn't exist any documentation from the production in the robot cell, which causes stop in the production. The data collection shows that an inner setting in the robot cell varies a lot, because the article supply is vast. Therefore it's hard to estimate average time for inner settings. The total time for inner settings could be reduced by shorten time for cleaning the CNC machine, pre-programming the robot and using fixtures which can be attached easily. This should increase the ability to run more articles in the robot cell.

The conclusion is that the company could improve the production, by upgrading and investing in equipment for the robot cell.

Improvements can also be achieved by reduce the time for inner settings, and also by collect statistics from the production in the robot cell. This should make it easier to find reasons that keep the utilization rate low.