Achieve 18-Month Payback and 55% Labor Reduction in High-Mix Manufacturing

The Challenge

The manufacturer produces a wide range of customized industrial components requiring manual surface finishing, which created a strong dependence on skilled manual labour and inconsistent quality across operators and shifts. The operation faced increasing difficulty hiring and retaining experienced workers alongside ergonomic risks associated with repetitive sanding and grinding. Traditional automation had been evaluated previously but ruled out because conventional robotic solutions required rigid fixturing, detailed CAD data, and extensive reprogramming for each part variant, making them impractical for a high-mix, low-volume environment.

The Solution

The company deployed MARI’s Scan&Go™ AI-driven robotic platform to automate surface finishing while preserving production flexibility. Using integrated 3D scanning and AI-based perception, the system captures the geometry of each incoming part and autonomously generates optimized finishing paths in real time without requiring CAD models or fixed part positioning. Operators load parts naturally, allowing the robotic system to adapt digitally rather than mechanically, which eliminated changeovers between SKUs and supported seamless integration alongside existing manual processes under a human-robot collaboration model. Deployment followed a phased approach—moving from initial setup and integration to application tuning and stable production operation—reaching a stable state in weeks with no major disruption to ongoing operations.