By Fiona Vernon
With technology developing so rapidly over the past century, assembly lines have become an effective and common method of manufacturing complex products, like vehicles, appliances, and other electronics from Spokane, Washington, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They involve human hands, robotics, or machines that keep parts moving along a conveyor belt in a specific and organized manner. Each worker or machine usually performs a precise, specific action with the goal of having each component travel the least distance possible while building a larger product. A significant part of Berran Industrial Group’s business are its custom automation and assembly machines. Paul Zuzik, the vice president of the Engineering Group, gives an example of an assembly system for a valve used in the food and drink industry that exemplifies their superior products. The 15-year-old design for this particular machine has been in operation for over 35 million cycles and still uses most of the original cylinders, drives, and sensors. Mr. Zuzik stresses that Berran isn’t locked into a specific market or process. They understand and are grounded in the basics of engineering and simply apply their knowledge of mechanisms systems and controls to whatever process needs to be automated, and they recently produced a one-of-a-kind connector assembly machine. An interesting part of special custom machinery are the controls and programming. It’s very common for the PLC programming to be one-of-a-kind, so Berran is constantly operating in a program development mode for any business from San Diego, California, to Atlanta, Georgia. Course quality and minimizing the impact of quality problems is extremely important, so Berran is very active in quality control fixturing, as well as the inclusion of quality checks in the process of many of its machines.