The use of automation over manual operations has been a growing trend for decades.
Human labour is increasingly being replaced by robotics and automated machinery (Lennard, 2013). Automation brings a lot of benefits compared to manual labour, for example removing the risk of human errors, improving efficiency and consistency and reducing waiting times in operations (Salim, 2017). One of the biggest advantages is the improvement of worker safety, as possibly dangerous duties can be given to an auto-mated device. The use of automation can also reduce the risk of minor injuries that might occur in manual labour. In addition, workers can be motivated by placing them to more intellectually challenging duties while automated machines and robots are taking care of the simpler, repetitive tasks. (Nichols, 2017.)
It doesn’t come as a surprise that heavy machinery are substantial investments, which have the life expectancy of at least 10 years, possibly much longer. The problem with these machines is that their technology gets old and therefore they are not as efficient as they should be. Nevertheless, they are still functional. At this point, investing on a new expensive machine might not be the best choice, but something should be done to the ageing machines to maintain operational efficiency as high as possible.
Retrofitting means adding equipment to an existing system to correct a defect or add capability (Park and Allaby, 2017). Retrofitting can increase efficiency, reduce costs as well as improve occupational safety and working conditions. It can also enable auto-mated operations to previously manual machines. (Kalmar, 2017a.) In addition, it is a lot cheaper to install new equipment onto an old machine than invest on a totally new machine.
It has been noticed that retrofitting as a concept might invoke negative images in cus-tomers, thus making it harder for manufactures to sell the idea (Mandel, 2010). Con-vincing the customers that investing on a properly engineered system can actually bring significant savings has been a difficult task. What is more, the process of retrofitting has been seen challenging since after purchasing, additional savings are hard to come by.
(Rouse, 2007.) The goal of this thesis is to clarify one retrofit process and demonstrate that retrofitting does not mean a once in a lifetime investment and that it can bring sav-ings and increase operational safety after the first purchase too.
This thesis is a study on developing a product-service system (PSS) for automation ret-rofits in the field of container handling and was commissioned by Kalmar, a cargo han-dling company. The thesis focuses on developing a PSS for RTG (rubber-tyred gantry
crane) retrofits. In Kalmar’s solution, a manual RTG can be retrofitted into an AutoRTG via four automation levels. Both customer needs and the structure of the original ma-chine define the automation level chosen for the retrofit process.
This chapter presents the premises to the thesis. First the need for the research is pre-sented. Next, the research problem and thesis objectives are covered. The research ques-tions are also listed. The scope of the thesis is explained in the third section and finally the structure of this thesis is presented in the fourth section.
1.1 Motivation and justification
The need for developing a PSS for the RTG retrofit became necessary when it was no-ticed, that for customers, it might be difficult to understand the benefits of automated machines over manually driven ones. Retrofitting an old RTG is currently an invest-ment, the advantages of which might not be evident. It was also difficult to try to sell the idea of retrofitting to customers without a documentation that clearly indicates what is needed to make the retrofit happen, what limitations the machines set and how the customer benefits when buying the retrofit. The goal for the PSS process is to create a series of documents which can show the customer, what retrofitting actually means in Kalmar and how it is done. With this, the hope is to get customers more excited about the opportunities that the retrofit solutions can offer.
The theoretical contribution of this thesis is to fill the existing gap of automation retrofit applications. Currently a substantial number of studies made of retrofit applications can be found for example in building services engineering, but the amount of studies made in the field of automation is much more limited. This thesis aims to create a framework suitable for automation technology and present some process models to fill this gap.
1.2 Research problem and objectives
The purpose of this thesis is to analyse what is needed to retrofit an RTG to a certain automation level and use the gathered info to create materials that will make the concept of retrofitting easier for potential customers to understand. The first objective of this thesis is to gather information about RTGs and the retrofitting process from different departments in Kalmar and find the parts that could be or already are standardized. The second objective is to benchmark other companies’ use of retrofitting and find methods that could be utilized in Kalmar. The third objective is to use this information collected both inside and outside Kalmar to develop a service product, called the RTG retrofit. To achieve these goals the retrofitting process and RTG automation levels must be properly explored and the right target group for the interviews must be found.
The research questions, which are formulated based on the objectives, are the following:
1) How to successfully develop a product-service system for automation retrofits based on literature?
2) How the retrofits can be made to look more tangible and how to make it easier for the customers to see the benefits that retrofitting offers?
3) How to create a framework for developing a product-service system for retrofits in general, so that it can be used in the future when launching retrofits for other prod-ucts?
1.3 Scope of the thesis
This thesis focuses on developing a product-service system for Kalmar RTG retrofits, with some limitations. The PSS process consists of defining the product, researching the field, designing, piloting and launching and finally evaluating and improving the created service product (Tuulaniemi, 2011). Also prizing, marketing, sales and follow-up can be seen as parts of a PSS process (Parantainen, 2007). In this thesis, the focus is put on researching the field and designing the product. Other parts are left out either because the target company has already defined them or because of the limitations of time given to produce the thesis. As the retrofit process in Kalmar usually takes up to 12 months from customer lead to project delivery, it is not possible to do follow-up or further de-velop the created product in this thesis. These parts are left for future research.
Currently the retrofits are done in Kalmar only to RTG machines. During the interviews it was pointed out that Kalmar has plans to extend retrofits to cover all the machines in their product portfolio (Interviewee 3, 2017). Thus this thesis only covers the retrofits done to RTG machines, leaving the rest of the product portfolio out.
1.4 Structure of the thesis
This thesis is divided into three parts: the theoretical part, empirical part and finally analysis of the results and suggestions for future studies. Chapter 2 covers the literature and industrial practises review. The selected topics to be discussed are automation retro-fits, the division of duties between humans and automation and the concept of product-service system. Chapter 3 introduces the research methods used in this thesis. It also presents additional material needed to carry out the empirical part. The chapter ends with a section, which presents the proposal to solve the research problem.
Chapter 4 discusses the implementation of the previously presented proposal. First, the results from the interviews are analysed followed by the analysis made from the bench-marking. The chapter ends with a description about the PSS process implemented, which based on the data gathered from the literature review, interviews and benchmark-ing. Chapter 5 consists of the conclusions and evaluation of the results and thesis pro-cess itself. The research questions are presented once more and answers to them are provided. The thesis ends with a discussion about topics for further research.