This is an excerpt from Auto Blog featuring Josh McNeely, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for RedViking. To see the actual article, click here.
Integrating both a battery-free and now, a battery power source within the same offering will expand customer reach.
Based at the company headquarters in the Greater Detroit area, RedViking, a Plymouth, Michigan design and build company for manufacturing and testing solutions, today announced that they will expand their AGV offering. By adding a battery power source solution in addition to their battery-free inductive power solution, “RedViking can service virtually every assembly manufacturing environment.” Says Josh McNeely, Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “From retrofitting an old plant with low volumes or building a Greenfield, brand new turnkey facility with high lift, high duty cycle, we have you covered.” For nearly a decade, RedViking has been building AGV assembly lines for large automotive and off-highway manufacturers replacing heavy, dirty and noisy chain-based conveyance solutions with flexible, scalable smart AGV solutions. To support their customers in a demanding automotive market, RedViking customized solutions to integrate with end-user information systems. The information-enabled capabilities of each machine make it easy for RedViking customers to integrate the AGVs with existing manufacturing execution systems (MES), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and other important decision-making systems. To help their customers stay competitive in a volatile automotive marketing, RedViking’s next move was to standardize components on their AGVs to minimize design and installation time allowing the growing customer base to collect information from the system and coordinate data with IIoT management systems. These smart AGVs can lift, lower, stop, start and rotate depending on location and product load. If a change needs to be made, the customer can easily reconfigure the embedded software configuration environment. Now, a battery solution offering can provide hybrid applications when the environment demands, making them a complete turnkey solution provider. “Many customers don’t know the questions to ask or what types of technologies or solutions are available and what options that presents them. That’s where RedViking comes in,” says McNeely.