Kamstrup

One of the world’s leading manufacturers of intelligent power meters, Kamstrup, has experienced a great growth the last years. The global market for meters for water, electricity and heating is booming in line with the increased focus on energy, efficiency and sustainability.

At Kamstrup the autonomous mobile robots from Mobile Industrial Robots are important factors.  They have challenged the traditional conveyor belts in the production hall in which semi-finished and finished items are to be transported between production lines and robotic cells.

The MiR robots are now the adaptable link between the cells. Even though a conveyor belt costs half the price of a MiR robot, the value of the flexibility added by the mobile robots means that it pays off for Kamstrup to use the effective robots from MiR.

The MiR robots run non-stop 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. Conveyor top modules are deployed on the robots enabling them to automatically deliver and receive items at the robotic cells. The fully automated and flexible solution ensures maximum utilization of production capacity. Production Manager at Kamstrup, Flemming Møller Hansen, explains:  

The prerequisite to secure our growth position in the global market is that we refine the products, reduce our costs and ensure a short delivery time. Our production is characterized by High-Mix, High-Volume. Therefore, we invest in flexible automation. And we have actually managed to increase our production volume, while we have integrated new automation solutions for more than 30 million DKK (4,500,000 USD) into our existing production layout. It is extremely unusual that we have been able to avoid downtime, which in the same time has doubled. If we had chosen conveyor belts instead of mobile robots, it would have meant a lot of costly production downtime, says Flemming Møller Hansen, Kamstrup.

Kamstrup develops and manufactures all its products at the headquarter in Stilling, Denmark. In 2017, Kamstrup has built another production hall in which another fleet of 7-10 MiR robots also will be the link between processes and ensure efficiency.

It has been crucial to our success with the MiR robots that they can be easily integrated and adapted to run in an existing production, says Flemmming Møller Hansen. He and his colleagues have had a good and efficient dialogue between Kamstrup, the local engineer and MiR dealer, Bila, and MiR’s own technical team:

The iterative process of cooperation has been very positive, and the time of response has been short. Normally, it is probably safer to lure a little instead of being one of the first to use relatively new and innovative technologies. But our growth rate means that we could not wait, and so we decided to invest in the mobile robots. We tested and compared the solutions of two different manufacturers, and MiR by far performed the best, states Kamstrup’s Production Manager.

Kamstrup is a world leading supplier of intelligent energy and water metering solutions with 1,200 employees in more than 20 countries. Its headquarter and production is located at Aarhus in Denmark, where Kamstrup was founded in 1946. Since then Kamstrup has produced more than 12 million consumption meters. Kamstrup expects a turnover of 2 billion DKK (3,2 million USD) in 2017. The company is owned by the Danish energy group, OK.