Z-AXIS has been constructing electronic products in our contract manufacturing facility near Rochester, New York since 1989. Over that time we have slowly advanced equipment and reconfigured the work floor to accommodate to new technology and to our customers’ changing needs.

 

And over that time, we have gained multiple different types of workbenches with a number of overhead fluorescent light fixtures.

 

Upgrading to LED lighting, we could have essentially upgraded the fluorescent tubes with LED tubes. This would have been the fastest, simplest, and lowest-benefit option. The fixtures would most likely nonetheless have ballasts, which waste a lot of energy and will burn out well before the LED tube does. We could rewire the fixtures to bypass the ballasts, but we’d still be settling for new technology in old packaging.

 

The second option was to exchange the fluorescent fixtures with something that appears to be very similar, like industrial-style commercial LED shop lights. This is new technology in old-style packaging. Because of this, the packaging retains lots of the disadvantages of the old technology:

 

(1) The large fixtures block the overhead lights and cast shadows on workspaces when off

(2) They shine light in all directions—including into workers’ eyes—instead of on the workpiece

(3) They collect dust on top

 

And they would be time-consuming to put, since we would need to configure a lot of different types of mounting systems to fit the various workbench styles.

 

We started to find out a real opportunity to get much larger advancements from this LED lighting project than we had at first thought, by changing our systems - in this case, the workbenches themselves — in place of force- fitting new technology into our old systems.

 

Our manufacturing engineers tailored a totally new workbench frame using commercially available extruded aluminum T-channel structures. The frame holds an LED light strip we formulated and manufacture in-house. It also holds the polycarbonate safety shield required between facing workstations.

 

Our electrical engineers formed the LED light strip and a constant-current LED driver. They chose high-end LEDs with integral lenses so that all the light is pointed down onto the work area without the need for reflectors. They chose LEDs with a warm color temperature for light that is enjoyable to humans. These two features add a bit to the cost and reduce a bit from the efficiency compared to the cheaper LEDs commonly used on lighting strips, but are worth it for the increase in worker comfort.  And they are still miles better than fluorescents.

 

The new lighting fixtures deliver 2 times the light to the work area, using one-sixth of the energy of the old fixtures (15 W instead of 90 W).  The LEDs last 15 to 20 years, versus two or three years for fluorescents.

 

The new workbench frames with structured lighting permit a clear, uncluttered view across the work area, so line managers can more effortlessly observe workflows and recognize problems early.

 

The total cost of the new LED lighting and frames is no more than the cost of retrofitting industrial LED fixtures to the existing bench frames. This experience exemplifies the advantage of a systems-wide approach to manufacturing facility updates. As an alternative to executing a narrowly defined project, look at how it fits in the larger system and you may find opportunities for greater improvement at lower cost.

 

This article is originally posted on tronserve.com