Continual advances in product quality and functioning on the one hand and diversifying values on the other are subdividing consumption into more intricate segments. This trend is fueling a shift in the most basic concepts of factory automation; manufacturers are rapidly trending away from investments in automated machinery that pursues overall production efficiency via increases in speed and labor-saving of general-purpose parts processing, to “segmented automation” that enables flexible production at high levels of precision and efficiency via automated processing that deftly delivers the specification requirements of individual parts.

CONVEYOR BELT |