Grote robotic LED is IDEA of the Year

MADISON, Ind. — Grote Industries says their Product Development Engineer, Edward Sitarski, had a manufacturing breakthrough when he proposed automating manual terminal connector LED production.

The invention earned the project lead engineer the Employee Involvement Association’s Individual IDEA of the Year Award for 2007.

For over 65 years, the award has provided quality educational programs to a broad range of industries. It focuses on outstanding ideas of the year and leadership of employee involvement and suggestion systems programs.

Approximately 250,000 ideas are submitted each year from companies globally. Sitarski’s idea bested 90 finalists for the win.

The EIA Idea of the Year Award is based on finding an innovative solution for an existing problem. Grote’s challenge was to lower the cost on its LED head and tail lamps, dome lights, emergency lighting, and marker lamps, thus allowing Grote to provide customers with more economical LED lighting solutions. This had spurred Grote Industries to rethink its manufacturing workflow. Challenge turned into opportunity when Sitarski proposed robotics for improving manufacturing performance and productivity.

The EIA, says Grote, was impressed with numerous features of the robot cells: non-contact soldering methods, vision system robot orientation, plug-n-play hardware interchange, advanced process monitoring, product testing and quick-change capabilities.

Those capabilities allowed Grote to manufacture a multitude of different inventory part numbers at these stations, with changeover taking less than five minutes.