In today’s competitive CNC manufacturing environment, the need for quality is a given, and job shops often win or lose contracts based on per-part costs that vary by just fractions of a cent. Naturally, the promise of achieving cost-efficient, consistent machining results through the use of robotics and automation is attractive to large metalworking concerns and small job shops alike. But many managers considering automation wonder if the time is right for a change. Or, they worry that quality will suffer if they dare to automate the processes they currently rely on for profits.

Like any successful business venture, the move to automation is best approached by following a sequence of orderly steps. Being sure the time is right to make the move to automation can be accomplished in an orderly fashion as well. In fact, there are a number of “machining milestones” any manager can use as a yardstick to gauge a shop’s readiness for robotics. The first of these milestones is the attainment of stability—inherent reliability in the machining process being considered for automation.

Any endeavor in CNC requires equipment with a strong pedigree and which has been designed with your application in mind. But the environment in which your machinery operates is just as important — and much easier to overlook.

Since the purpose of automated machining is to have as few human hands on the workpiece as possible, and to minimize the labor and setup time required to get started with your work, ensuring work proceeds without disruption requires some effort on your part.

But it goes beyond productivity. Automating some of the processes you’re already familiar with will enable you to create new products you weren’t able to before. That includes developing more elaborate designs, as well as harnessing new manufacturing techniques, such as additive manufacturing.

But to do all this, you need a way to monitor, in real time, these and other factors:

• The level of equipment wear and the likelihood of breakage
• The thermal expansion of your machinery
• The position of the spindle in relation to all three axes of movement

Why these three factors specifically? Because a lot of the thermal expansion algorithms you’ll find out there for automated CNC purposes don’t take environmental conditions into account. How could they? Your facility is unique to the point where even opening and closing windows and doors can throw off machining algorithms if they weren’t written with your purposes, and your environment, in mind.

Of course, monitoring wear and environmental conditions also includes how close to breakage your machine and its more delicate components are at a given moment. To do that, your automation needs to include a mechanism to shut down production if it detects a breakage.

As you can see, all the familiar moving parts, so to speak, of CNC machining, are still there. The fundamentals haven’t changed. The difference is simply this: Automated CNC machines have “brains” that can observe and react to far more stimuli than even the most attentive machinist. There’s certainly a unique artisan pleasure to be found in building something by hand and intuition it’ll never go out of style, and might well be the superior choice for some of the work you do. Just note, you might never unlock upper reaches of capability and productivity if you ignore new technologies.