“All our products are customized and we don’t have the luxury of unlimited space in our production facility, so incorporating industrial robots, caging or safety guarding is difficult,” he says. “However, I could instantly picture how the cobots would slot seamlessly into our operations.”

Starting out with one UR3 cobot and quickly purchasing five more, B-Loony has deployed the cobots to do a range of tasks that human operators previously handled manually. These employees now work closely alongside and supervise up to four cobots at a time that carry out tasks such as blowing up balloons, sewing bunting together and assembling food-flags. The cobots can handle the most routine and repetitive elements of these tasks, freeing up staff to focus on higher value activities such as quality control.

Another benefit of the cobots has been the ability to redeploy them at short notice when circumstances change. “For example, the product line the cobots were initially brought in for was discontinued. Yet the company was able to simply re-program the cobots and have them up and running elsewhere, future-proofing the investment,” Clephan explains.

With the help of cobot-automation, B-Loony is now producing a staggering 1,200 miles+ bunting each year, a distance equivalent of London to Casablanca. Furthermore, it has increased output of its highly popular gourmet food flags by over 5000%, from 250 thousand to 15 million per annum, significantly increasing its market share.

This increased productivity has resulted in B-Loony achieving a payback period of just nine months for its initial cobot investments. Through economies of scale it anticipates payback for future projects to be brought down further to just six months.