Robotics ROI on the SME floor: where it's real, and where it's oversold

Most robotics proposals on an SME factory floor get evaluated on the wrong question. The one that matters is not whether the arm can do the task demonstrated at the trade show. It is whether that task repeats often enough, in a form consistent enough, for the capital to pay back before the product line changes underneath it. Get that wrong and the cell sits behind a reprogramming backlog nobody budgeted for. Get it right and it removes exactly the shift nobody wants to staff.

• 35%

  median local-staff salary rise at Panasonic's Singapore operation after three years of cobotisation

• 50–70%

  of qualifying capital costs the Enterprise Development Grant funds

Three conditions have to hold together, not separately: high repetition, the same motion hundreds or thousands of times a shift, not a batch that changes weekly; ergonomically poor work, repetitive lifting or awkward reach that is already producing injury claims and absenteeism, not just a labour line item; and stable product geometry, so the end-of-arm tooling and the programme do not need reworking every time the SKU changes.

Low-volume, high-mix work is the case that fails quietly rather than visibly. A cell built to demonstrate flexibility across a handful of SKUs a month rarely earns back its capital, because the changeover and reprogramming time consumes the labour saving it was supposed to deliver. The project is not cancelled, it is simply never quite as productive as the proposal said, and nobody goes back to check because there was no baseline recorded to check it against.

Panasonic's Singapore operation is worth studying because it names the mechanism, not just the outcome. Over three years, supported by the Economic Development Board, the company moved from manual lines to what it calls cobotisation, workers retrained to work alongside the machines rather than displaced by them. The median salary of its local staff rose 35 percent as the workforce moved into the supervision, programming and exception-handling roles the automation created. The same pattern shows up outside Singapore too: Multi-Wing's Czech plant put a cobot on a strenuous, repetitive lathe-tending station and moved the operator onto work that needed judgement, a reallocation of labour, not a headcount cut. We delivered the same shape of project ourselves at Raymang Eggs, where an Enterprise Development Grant-funded robotics line automated the repetitive, high-volume handling stations.

Question	What it should show
Repetition	Cycles per shift, sustained over months, not a single busy week
Variability	How many SKU or format changes the line sees per quarter
Consequence today	Injury claims, absenteeism or turnover already attributable to this task
Baseline	A recorded OEE or labour-hours figure before the cell goes in

Enterprise Singapore funds up to 50 percent of qualifying costs under the Enterprise Development Grant for a standard SME project, rising to 70 percent for a sustainability-linked project through a window that closed at the end of March this year. EDG itself is now being folded into a single unified grant, EDGE, launching later this year. None of that changes which tasks are worth automating. It changes how much of the capital risk the operator carries while finding out. A robotics proposal justified primarily on flexibility across a variable product mix, with no baseline measurement taken before commissioning, is the one most likely to be running below its proposed utilisation within a year, and it is checkable, on any given floor, by asking whether that baseline was ever recorded.