Pitts and Spitts, a leading producer of high-end smokers and grills since 1983, manufactures a wide range of products, including traditional offset smokers, wood pellet grills, charcoal grills, travel grills, combination pits, and fire pits. Over the years, Pitts and Spitts has developed a reputation for their customized product line – all built in-house by their team of skilled fabrication experts.
Steady growth prompted the need to scale its production operations, respond faster to customer orders, and expand its dealer network. Pitts & Spitts CEO Ryan Zboril turned to ARC Specialties, a FANUC Authorized System Integrator that specializes in providing welding services and automation solutions for a wide range of industries.
After reviewing traditional industrial robots, Pitts & Spitts decided that a FANUC CRX-10iA/L collaborative robot solution would work best for their needs. The CRX is compact and integrates into an existing workspace. Its friendly tablet-style programming made it easy for employees to learn and use in a very short timeframe. In fact, all the employees quickly embraced the cobot technology - they now use the CRX to handle the mundane, repetitive tasks, which frees up their time to do what people do best – the more intricate welds and quality control.
After implementing the cobot automation, Pitts and Spitts has doubled their wholesale footprint and now has distribution and wholesalers all over the U.S. as well as in Canada, Australia and Norway. They attribute this success to the automation experts at ARC Specialties, who provided the right solution for Pitts & Spitts to start their automation journey with the FANUC CRX cobot. The future looks bright, and as production volumes continue to increase, Pitts & Spitts sees the possibility of implementing additional automation at their facility.