I have spent more time preparing pouches for our UR5e trial than I expected to spend on the whole exercise. The robot transfers a presented bag into a tray neatly, but each change in fill or pouch shape has needed another insert or adjustment.
Yesterday I caught myself moving the least cooperative bags to one side so I could finish a demonstration. I put them back, but it was an uncomfortable moment. I was protecting the demonstration rather than learning whether the process suited our work.
My team has been patient. I would like to discuss stopping the mixed-product trial without making everyone feel the effort was wasted. Has anyone had that conversation successfully?
What would you lose by stopping the mixed-product work and keeping the best-defined case for review? There may be a useful application in there, but the demonstration should not depend on you selecting cooperative bags.
Our packing trial became one colleague's personal shift. Everyone called it automatic because the arm moved by itself. He arranged every awkward pack before it got there, stayed late to change the guides and came in on his day off when a different pack arrived.
He finally took a week away and we packed manually. That gave us the comparison we'd been avoiding. We kept one repetitive order on the cell later, but stopped pretending the rest belonged there. Your team may be waiting for you to say what they've already noticed.
I did this morning. Our supervisor said she wondered where those bags had gone. She was kind about it, which was worse for about ten seconds and then a relief.
The operators want the bench space back for mixed orders. They are willing to help assess one repeat product, provided the changeover does not depend on me being there.
Price that one product as a whole order, including getting the bench ready and clearing it afterwards. You already know the transfer can look good. The next trial should tell you whether the complete job is worth keeping.
A regular pouch with a consistent fill and the same supplied shape. It still has occasional badly presented bags, and those will stay in the sample set. We have agreed to stop the other variants now.
One packer, with the trial lead supervising and my notes available. I will attend the first walkthrough, then let them identify the bits the notes fail to explain.
Let them finish a sentence before you help. I mean that kindly. It's horribly tempting to fix every snag before somebody can show you what confused them.
The desk walkthrough found two setup choices I had never written down. We have added those and arranged the supervised trial. No result for the repeat product yet. The mixed orders are back on the manual bench.
That gives you a smaller question to answer. I would be interested in the packer's view after the trial, particularly how much help they needed after the initial setup.