From Volume 3 Issue 3 of Connected.
In this edition of Connected, we introduce one of the newest members of Kirby Risk: Dave Fox, General Manager of Robotics at CIM SYSTEMS ROBOTICS.
TELL ME ABOUT YOUR ROLE.
We have a great team that I work with to manage everything from qualifying potential robotic applications to ensuring projects ship out on schedule. I am also involved in engineering and high-level programming calculations.
No two days are the same. On any given day, we can be found working on a little bit of everything from sales and quoting to reviewing tooling drawings to analyzing project profitability. I might be in front of a customer, working on a robot simulation or trying to find a part for a customer that is in trouble. There’s a common theme at CIM — if someone has a project that’s not quite ready and a deadline is looming, the whole team jumps in to bring it to completion.
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO JOIN THE KIRBY RISK FAMILY OF BUSINESSES?
We’ve been buying PLCs and other components from Kirby Risk since the 1990s and have always had a lot of respect for the company. Last year, Kirby Risk brought us in to work on a robotic application for one of their customers. That was a very successful project, and we started getting opportunities to collaborate on other projects. Those successes led to discussions about a more formal partnership.
Laura Fox, Co-owner and CFO, and I had been thinking about retiring eventually and we wanted to keep CIM going beyond our involvement in the company. We wanted a succession and retirement plan that would keep our business intact and honor our commitments to our customers and our employees, who are our most valuable assets.
Kirby Risk has a strong sales force, reputation and brand recognition in certain markets, while CIM had a different customer reach and service offering. We knew right away this relationship would benefit both parties and their customers with a more complete offering of product and service solutions while ensuring the continuation of the business we worked so hard to build for the past 35 years.
WHAT MAKES CIM SYSTEMS DIFFERENT IN THE ROBOTICS SCENE?
We are unique. We can do everything in-house for a robot cell, beginning with the design and layout, to the programming and communications, to the tooling fabrication, to all the assembly and testing. A lot of places will farm out portions of the process like the tooling and machining, but we offer a full-service, turnkey solution.
YOU SHARE A CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY WITH US?
We have a customer that worked with us on their first robot implementation in the late 90’s. We put the robot in to resolve a quality control issue. The robot reduced the scrap waste to almost nothing right away. The customer went from a 12 percent scrap waste to .2 percent within the first week because the robot handled the parts more delicately and consistently than a human. The customer has since duplicated the process throughout the plant and has almost 200 robots running now. They have quadrupled their sales capacity using robots.