Low Cost Automation – What does it actually mean?

The notion of low cost automation (LCA) has become an indispensable part of the philosophy of lean production. As the name suggests, low cost automation may best be paraphrased as ‘simple automation’. But what does this mean in practice?

The source of this kind of automation can be found in the 1970s – at the time of the first Ölund investment crisis. Low cost automation was, in its time, the result of the kaizen activities of shop-floor co-workers in Japanese world-class enterprises.

LCA arose partly on account of a product-oriented kind of manufacturing (lean manufacturing) in which products were manufactured in the smallest possible number in cells according to the one-piece-pull principle. This was markedly different to the kind of production which, even today, is widespread in the west and marked by a separation of processes according to their functions and the technology involved.

In other words, here in the West, according to the rules of mass production or the principle of volume digression, products are pushed in the greatest possible amounts quite literally through the manufacturing process.

These two different kinds of production, depending respectively on the principles of pull and push, make quite different demands on the flexibility of manufacturing and thus on its degree of automation.

It is interesting to note that recent developments have shown, especially in the West, that the time of quantitative growth is past. Volumes are increasing only through the acquisition of firms or predatory competition. For the sake of stimulating buyers’ interest and of serving the increasingly heterogeneous needs of customers, new products are being launched onto the market in continually briefer cycles. This is leading to an increase in the product variants and thus to a rise in the degree of complexity in manufacture.