I sell robotic arms like this for a competitor of the brand you’ll see in the video and/or email you just received from PSA. This makes things very interesting and I’m curious if anyone knows more about this? Will also be attempting to get my foot in the door to sell some robots to Steve Sloan.
Scroll down a bit to see a very short clip of a Mitsubishi robotic arm with an end of arm vision system.
PSA’s looking into automation but they still pay their workers 10 pesos per shift… Sounds about right
I guess the end of arm is more of a scanner or barcode reader after looking at it a second time. It may be safe to assume they are not yet handling individual cards with robotic arms yet, but I am happy to see they are going in this direction.
That was the most useless video ever. I was excited to see what the robot does but the video showed only closeups, and the memo was incredibly vague in description. Definitely written by the advertising dept. I am familiar enough with Cognex cameras (the yellow scanner on the robot head) to know that they are an industry standard for barcode scanning in shipping warehouses as well as high speed part quality checking. For them to now be using these for “receiving, researching, spec identification, and preparing an order for grading” I’d have to imagine they’re trying to match the photo of the received card to what card that is in their system? Would be interesting to see how that works and they would need a reference card for their database in all cases I would imagine.
I would say they arent involving the actual card at all yet, but have no idea. This may be another reason why some submissions have been taking forever to get put into their system. They are in the development and testing phase of automating this process and could be creating a few bottlenecks while they work out the kinks
If the scanner were simply to scan in packages it would be stationary. I would think the same for the cards though. Cognex would have happily sold them multiple cameras on a 360 degree stand the boxes would convey through and they’d be able to scan shipping labels off that to know what theyd received. I had a coworker 2 years ago implement this at an Amazon site. Sometimes though people get sold a robot when they don’t actually need one so I guess it could be either boxes or cards here. But I lean to it scanning cards because they mention it helping their “researching”.
Actually in one of their previous announcements they stated that ‘Robocop’ would be in use mostly for logging incoming submissions, which at this point is still a welcome addition if you consider the manual process currently takes up to 7 weeks.
I am curious to see just how much of a boost this gives to their turn around times, or if it will just shift a bottle neck of orders waiting to be logged to them all just waiting at grading for the same overall time.
This was really interesting— As I was scrolling through my sales leads today at work, I saw that we recently closed a deal with Collectors Universe on a Customer Experience deal.
PSA is placing a very high priority on CX recently and it’s good to see.
For all the talk about PSA’s lack of response to customer’s needs, there is little to no praise on this announcement.
I do think only time will tell whether these changes will bring about significant improvements, but automation, 20+ new members of staff, and a dedicated team for bulk submissions sounds like something to be positive about. Obviously, such changes need to come alongside efficient resource management or they will just go to waste, but still shows that PSA recognize the need to catch up to their customer’s expectations and the growth of their customer base.
For me, if they manage to decrease the turnaround times from 100 days back to 60 and the entry times from 7 weeks back to 1, I’ll be satisfied.
I agree with all you are saying, I am just wondering about better details on how this automation is being implemented in their submission process. It sounds GREAT to say that anyone is using automation in their process because that immediately sounds efficient as a reader. And besides how it might positively impact their speeds, as a controls engineer I am genuinely curious how this will be used to assist them.
@greenpotatoes , there is only way to find out. You will need to infiltrate them by applying for a job there, and then report back to your fellow forum members. 
But yes, on a more serious note, whether it is automation or manual labour, efficient management is required in order to obtain noticeable improvement.
In my book PSA jumped the first hurdle by recognizing the need for more resources and taking action accordingly. My next expectation as a customer is that these resources are adequately managed and deployed to bring service levels down to acceptable turnaround times.
One big risk I see here is that by hiring too many people too quickly, standards may be compromised and work quality becomes deficient, which in turn will require the more experienced people to spend their time rectifying mistakes made by newstarters. One of my submissions has been on quality check 2 for over a week, and that makes me wonder whether things are starting to clog on that end due to increased errors at previous stages or lack of experienced staff to sign off quality control.
In the end we can only speculate, but these are surely developments I am eager to follow.