In an automobile plant, anything that leads to efficiency
improvement needs to be lauded. Nissan Motor has announced that it was
licensing its patents and know-how for a nuts-and-bolts delivery system, ‘Automatic
Parts Feeder Technology’, to Japanese firm MICE in Kawasaki, an industrial city
near Yokohama.
The Automatic Parts Feeder Technology supplies factory
workers the required number of parts automatically, according to the vehicle
model being produced. This was stated in a press release by Nissan. The Mayor
of Kawasaki, Norihiro Fukuda, said MICE’s product was developed on a Nissan
patent.
Workers at Nissan factories are required to pick the
needed number of bolts or nuts from boxes containing many parts, a task that
causes difficulties even for the most seasoned worker. The Feeder is improving
work efficiency and quality by preventing mistakes in the number of parts.
Hideo Sasaki of Nissan’s Monozukuri Planning Group says
manufacturing is a nuts and bolts world. “In factories, nearly everything is
about screwing together nuts and bolts, and I’ve been dealing with nuts and
bolts for decades at Nissan. It’s always been difficult to find the right parts
dispenser, although there are many products in the market, so we thought, ‘If
it’s not sold, let’s make it,’ and that was when we started development,” he
said.
MICE intends to commercialise the “Feeder” using a
license that enables resale to other companies engaged in manufacturing.
Source: Nissan
Motors