What Went Wrong (and Right) When 47 Plants Deployed Collaborative Robots: The ROI Math Nobody Talks About
Most cobot deployments hit 60-70% of promised throughput gains in year one. We tracked 47 installations across metalworking, assembly, and packaging to find out why, and what separates the 8 that actually beat projections.
I spent three weeks in May visiting plants that had deployed collaborative robots in the past 18 months. I went to see the wins, but mostly I wanted to find the installations where the numbers didn't work. The plants where the six-figure investment sat idle by 3 p.m. on a Thursday, or where the promised 40% cycle time reduction never materialized. What I found was not a failure of the hardware. It was a failure of operational planning, and the failure looked almost identical across every site where ROI underperformed.
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