Industrial automation company, Rockwell Automation, has worked with Kia Slovakia to upgrade elements of the car firm’s body shop through the deployment of Kinetix servo technologies.
The body shop lifters use servo motors and drives to elevate and orient primary car body components during the manufacture of Kia’s Ceed and Sportage models. The lifter’s existing servo solution was identified by Kia engineers as approaching end-of-life, so the system underwent replacement over the summer shutdown.
“End-of-life and obsolete components elevate risk levels and the possibility of downtime in any manufacturing operation,” said Mark Bottomley, Regional Vice President, Strategic Accounts and Sales Specialists, EMEA at Rockwell Automation. “But in lean, just-in-time environments, such as automotive, this downtime can have a significant and costly impact on the critical path.
“Users of legacy equipment also miss out on the many benefits delivered by digitally capable hardware. For this reason, we offer a comprehensive modernisation programme that helps companies leverage the benefits of digital transformation.”
Through this modernisation programme, the body shop not only benefitted from greater uptime-related resilience, but also the added capabilities delivered by modern digitalised hardware running contemporary communication networks.
“This is an important part of the production process, so our primary requirement, in addition to accuracy, is reliability,” said Peter Holubčík, Assistant Manager, Maintenance Body at Kia Slovakia. “When downtime is required, such as when we reconfigure the lifters, we need to do this as quickly as possible, something that the new, tightly integrated PLC, servo and network architecture will allow us to do.”
Kia’s deployment of Allen‑Bradley Kinetix 5700 servo drives and MPL servo motors also streamlined much of what goes on behind the scenes, with Rockwell Automation PLCs handling software migration, adaptations, and upgrades.
