In bringing a product to display fronts and shelves, manufacturers must make haste. Even the slightest delay in today’s market space can disrupt business, and cause losses to brands. While major industry players can afford to have top-class robotics and automation in their production, often SMEs trying to mimic the large firms fall of the grid. One pioneer of the sustainable international refurbished robot market, IRS Robotics is changing this situation by enabling SMEs as well as multinationals to purchase a renewed robot at a third or fifth of the price of a new one.

So, then what is the difference of buying a used robot versus an IRS Robotics Refurbished Robot? Every piece of automation machinery that IRS acquires goes through stringent screening, testing, and are fully serviced in-house before it is marked for sale. As robotics is mostly about Total Cost of Ownership in terms of a company or manufacturer perspective, IRS does not stop at just selling a client a robot but also offers warranty, pragmatic service, spare parts, training and advice. The approach allows clients to have not only a quicker ROI from the reduced cost of the machines but also save maintenance costs in the long-term utilization of the robot’s functionality. Annually, IRS delivers 300 to 600 refurbished robots back into the market, and always maintains an average stock of 500 to 1000 robots at its facility.

An active participant in the robotics spare parts arena, IRS offers a wide range of spare parts from multiple robot manufacturing companies such as ABB, FANUC, KUKA and YASKAWA. For those robots that do not pass the final checks, IRS dismantles them, and recycles any parts that is reusable. Besides, the new or refurbished spares, IRS also provides third-party robot parts as an alternate option, highly sought after these replacements are equivalent in quality to the original item. Given the multiple choices, SMEs can quickly change a faulty part of a robot at a cost-effective rate, and with IRS quality, reliability, cooperation and service.

IRS, in addition to working with SMEs and multinationals also works with independent robot system integrators (SI) offering them the opportunity to resell IRS’ refurbished wares instead of a new one. As the robots are moderately priced, SIs can get more orders and open to a wider audience in terms of their business regimen. In case, a system integrator wants to only sell a robot but not offer after market support, IRS can act as the service partner and carry out repairs and periodic checkups of a sold robot if required. For SMEs and SIs alike, the refurbished robot provider performs maintenance for industrial 6-axis, and 4-axis robots and ABB’s Flex/Delta picker. The process structure includes solving robot failures, and routine testing of the equipment at regular intervals.

Deep-rooted in the manufacturing automation industry, IRS also provides clients production floor workers intensive and practice-oriented training for equipment that it refurbishes, installs, and services. The best part of the educative courses is that it is charged on an hourly or daily basis, and always aligned to the specific robot, situation or application as intended by clients. Those undergoing the classes can select the amount of time they want to spend learning, and make the interactions a few hours or days long, or precisely the time it takes to achieve goals.