When hot attention is paid to intelligent home furniture,the furniture production automation revolution is carried on quietly.Since this year, with the promotion of robots’s painting the wood furniture,assembling the faucet accessories,cutting the wood floors in Carpoly,Powerdekor,Bravat,Ikea and other enterprises of furniture,painting,bathroom,floor and the popularity of flexible automation production line in the custom home furniture enterprises,panel furniture factories,furniture industry and furniture and home furnishing material industry are getting rid of the traditional image of high investment,high consuming,high pollution ,low efficiency and labor intensive industry and are transforming to the new industry of high efficiency,high technology.

With the wide application of robots and numerical control technology,the degree of home automation is improved significantly.

With the popularity of automation in all kinds of industries,a lot of home furniture factories are trying changing labor into robots and are improving the production efficiency through automation and half automation and mechanized production.From Ikea introduction of ABB robots for kitchen cabinet production to Bravat’s processing the copper parts of faucet by Robot arms,from the automation cutting in Powerdekor to the automatic edge banding in Suofeiya,the machine substitution not only improves the production environment of home furniture manufacturers and furnishing material factories but also enhances the production efficiency and reduces the production cost.

Starting from last year, with the mandatory implement of water borne paint to wooden furniture in Shenzhen and other areas,Carpoly introduced robots to the electrostatic spraying production line of water borne paint,making the spraying of water borne paint into automation.’Many custom home furniture factories or hotel furniture factories face the problems of difficult construction,low efficiency,waste of paint,serious pollution and other cost problems and these problems are the biggest obstacles that many home furniture manufacturers and hotel furniture manufacturers are not willing to change the oil paint to water borne paint,however,the electrostatic spaying of water borne paint increases the use rate from 40% to 80%.Robots can paint one board and dry it within 10 seconds,which improves the surface spraying utilization rate and efficiency,reduces the costs and accelerates the popularity of water borne paint’,Zhu Yanan,the general manager of Carpoly department of water borne paint indicated.

Robots also have good performance in the industry of ceramic bathroom.In Zhuhai Haizhou Bathroom Factory,which produces for Germany Hansgrohe,Germany Bravat,Oppein Bathroom and other well known brands,Journalist found the robot arms were sanding,polishing and painting the faucet copper parts and other procedures expertly.The managing director of Bravat Bathroom,Gua Wan told the journalist that since the introduction of robot last year,one production line need only one person and the efficiency of copper parts processing and other production lines are improved 50 percent.

High Labor Cost Hasten The Automation and Robots Brings A Lot Of Changes

As traditional manufacturing,enterprises of bathroom,paint,furniture and floor are always labor intensive industry but why did they accelerate the automation production in the recent two years?Yin Hong, the vice secretary general of China Building Ceramics&Sanitary Ware Association said, taking the example of the ceramics bathroom,on one hand because of loss of workers,the labor cost arose and drove the manufacturers replace the labor in certain procedures with robots.What procedures can be replaced by robots?The journalist learned that at present,the automation production in bathroom industry concentrated on replacing the traditional plaster mould with high pressure forming mould,replacing the hand glazing with manipulator and adding logo with mechanical grinding wheel and other procedures.Kitchen cabinet factories dye color and paint with robots,wood floor enterprises cut and move products with robots and home furniture factories use robots to polishing and paint.

What changes does the introduction of robots bring to the production procedures of home furnishing products?When visiting Capoly electrostatic spraying production line of water borne paint,Zhu Yanan told the journalist ,’Compared with the common brush and painting,electrostatic spraying bore the advantage of fullness of the oil film,strong adhesion and good looking.Further, the robots’ participation of electrostatic spraying reduces the splashing and waste,makes the utilization rate of electrostatic spray rise from 30%-40% to 70%-80% and reduces the pollution ,which ensures the health of the workers.At the same time, robot electrostatic spray can be carried on in a large area,so the workers can install more than one electrostatic spray guns to spray simultaneously to shorten the spraying time and improve the efficiency of spraying’.According to the release of Zhu Yanan,at present, Color LLife,Zuoyou Furniture,Landbond Furniture,Changjiang Furniture and other first tier enterprises have heavy interest in the robot electrostatic spray production line.

In the Bravat bathroom factory of Zhuhai,there are only several workers in the full automatic warehousing logistic workshop of tens of thousands of square meters.The robot arms can identify orders automatically according to ERP system and grasp different goods from the same order to pack them.In Suofeiya factory in Zengchen,the first flexible automatic production line of custom wardrobe integrates ERP and other software,thus placing order, splitting orders and other procedures can be generated by system automatically.The panels can be identified by the edge banding machine and the panel can be grooved when edge banding.Full automatic measuring machine can check the size of the items to be packed and send the data to trimmer which automatically cut the paper box required,which improves the packing efficiency dramatically.

Long Way For Comprehensive Automation And the Retail Will Benefit Gradually

The industry insiders pointed out although the initial investment was big to the home furnishing factories who adopted automation production line and replace labor with robots and generally one robot needed around hundreds of thousands of initial investment,in the long term,it can reduce the production cost dramatically in view that one robot can substitute 5 workers each of whom has an annual wages of forty thousand Yuan.

The CEO of Ikea China,Zhu Changlai said,at present,one production line of Ikea kitchen cabinet had 7 ABB robots:two of them were used for sanding and 5 with high pressure guns were used for dying and spraying.There were 4 workers for the robot spraying line during a shift while there were 8 workers for the old manual spraying line.12 workers were reduced for three shifts.According to calculation ,the payback period of robot production line was 2.4 years.According to Zhu Yanan,the purchasing cost of one spraying robot is more than two hundred thousand yuan and to cater to the enterprises transforming demand of robot substitution,Capoly invested more than 1 million to set up model production line of water borne paint and provide the technique support for the updating of painting line of massive home furniture manufacturers and hotel furniture manufacturers.

The introduction of robot reduces the production cost, then the enterprises will reduce the factory price or retail price initiatively?The purchasing director of Shenzhen Color Life Furniture Co.,Ltd ,Liu Delu said,’through UV coating,water borne coating and other more environment-friendly mechanical coating to replace labor and reduce the dependence on labor,we expand our profit space massively, accordingly our factory price will be decreased.Industry insiders said,at present, plenty of enterprises just replaced labor with robot only for some of production procedures and there was a long way for furnishing material factories to realize the overall automation.Further labor cost is one factor of production cost.In terms of furniture and furnishing material,there are many profit links such as distributors and so on ,whether the price is reduced will result in the decrease of retail price depends on the policy of furniture and the flexibility of distributors.