A New Campaign Brings to Light the Simplicity of the Symphoni™ Assembly Platform, and It All Boils Down to Three Core Technologies

Symphoni™: A Brilliant Combination of Efficiency and Speed

TARGETING MEDICAL DEVICE, ELECTRONICS AND CONSUMER PACKAGED GOODS MANUFACTURERS

Over the past two months, an email campaign to ‘deconstruct’ Symphoni was launched targeting medical device, electronics, and consumer packaged goods manufacturers in North America and Europe. Subscribers received in advance of the multi-channel campaign, which is launching in the following weeks, the first two of the four-part blog series that introduces and breaks the Symphoni platform into its three core technologies: SuperTrak CONVEYANCE™, RSM Technology®, and the E-Cam.

The objective is to answer the question ‘What is Symphoni?’ and to solidify its position in the marketplace as an assembly platform that is a brilliant combination of efficiency and speed.

“Manufacturers find it almost unbelievable how Symphoni performs at such high speeds and efficiency, let alone how it achieves such outstanding results. Symphoni is all about its simplicity,” said Peng-Sang Cau, ATS Life Sciences Systems, VP for Emerging Markets and Symphoni. “We want to show this technology and illustrate its core components. Seeing Symphoni in action always overcomes any disbelief about how simple yet effective it is.”

This multimedia campaign breaks Symphoni down into three core building blocks:

  1. SuperTrak CONVEYANCE™, a smart linear motion technology that carries components from station to station.
  2. Rapid Speed Matching, or RSM Technology®, a patented control method that drives the RSM Disc (a digital device that functions like continuous motion dials, but 90% smaller) and RSM Arm (a lightweight, articulating, servo-controlled 2-axis arm).
  3. Electronic Camming, referred to as the ‘E-Cam’, which acts like the conductor of the show, coordinating all components of Symphoni and making it all possible.

By deconstructing Symphoni into these core components, we demonstrate that this standard, modular, scalable solution can achieve the following three key results without compromise:

  • Speed: Higher rates with gentle parts handling means higher throughput. It is the digital nature of Symphoni and its lean methodology that allows the platform to achieve speed without sacrificing quality.
  • Flexibility: As a modular system, not only can Symphoni quickly and easily scale up, but it is also capable of adapting to new products and processes. Because every Symphoni machine is configured from standardized, pre-tested, and pre-validated building blocks, it dramatically reduces time to market for product launches.
  • Efficiency: Symphoni doesn’t just reduce non-value-added time—it ensures that core value-added processes are respected, and no additional force is applied to components. Furthermore, its digital nature means significantly less employee training time, maintenance and spares costs, mechanical tooling, and floorspace.

“The result is a transformative digital platform that combines the best of all worlds in assembly automation: indexing motion, continuous motion, and pick-and-place robots,” explains Cau.

The heart of the campaign is a case study presentation by Ken Nicholson, Director of R&D, ATS Life Sciences Systems and one of the inventors of Symphoni. The video provides an overview of the technology and demonstrates how it achieved groundbreaking results for a client to produce autoinjectors.

  • Symphoni dramatically reduced the footprint by more than 50%
  • Symphoni significantly reduced tooling by over 90%
  • The client’s goal to run two different autoinjectors on the same machine was successful.

Subscribers to the Symphoni newsletter got an early sneak peek of Part One: An Introduction to Deconstructing Symphoni and Part Two: Symphoni & SuperTrak CONVEYANCE™, and these are now available. Parts Three (Rapid Speed Matching) and Four (E-Cam) are scheduled to be released within the coming weeks, with the public digital multi-channel campaign commences next week with Part 1 of the four part series.

ABOUT ATS AND SYMPHONI

ATS Corporation is a global industrial automation company that offers innovative solutions and products to industries such as the life sciences, consumer products, electronics, and electric vehicles (EV).

Symphoni is a standardized, modular high-performance digital assembly platform, and is one such innovation offered by ATS. Symphoni delivers high speed, agility, and gentle parts handling with rates from 40 to 1100 PPM and MOEE of over 98%. A Symphoni machine is 30-80% smaller in footprint than conventional equipment. It is scalable from prototype to full production as it is configured from pre-tested and pre-validated building blocks.

Symphoni is to assembly automation what EVs are to the car. Like EV, Symphoni replaces cumbersome mechanical cams with an electronic cam (E-Cam) which, combined with its proprietary control, achieves high throughput by maximizing operational efficiency and minimizing the non-value-added processes to attain the perfect balance of speed, flexibility, and precision.

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