“Our biggest challenge is the permanent update on new applications”
The Biscayan cooperative, a Robotekin partner, specializes in the design and manufacture of automatic assembly and welding lines.
What is the context in which a cooperative project like MB Sistemas was founded?
It all started in 1996. Matrici Sistemas de ingeniería was created as a spin-off of the automotive leather parts stamping die company and with the idea of offering its customers a turnkey project of dies and the assembly systems for these leather parts with their internal reinforcements. In 2006, Matrici Sistemas became a cooperative company within the Mondragon Corporation, called MB Sistemas. At present, we are a mixed cooperative, where in addition to the worker-members, the cooperatives Batz and Matrici, and Mondragon Inversiones also take part in the company. We currently have 54 workers, who try to provide solutions and answers to an increasingly diversified customer portfolio and in a process of internationalization every day more important.
What is the main activity?
We manufacture products in assembly and welding lines, and we offer services in seaming systems. We try to provide an integral service, hand in hand with the customer, offering him all the lines of the process. Our work philosophy is to be integrators, defining the process and integrating all the solutions. The work concept is clear: we define the process, we buy the robot, we acquire the systems for the installation of the glue or adhesive, we make the tooling, we program the control and the robot, and in short, we integrate everything, offering our customer a turnkey product. In this context, and from there, growth and success have been possible thanks to our flexibility, reliability and excellent management system.
What are MB’s Mission and Vision?
Our Mission is to provide competitive engineering solutions to our customers, seeking their satisfaction in long-term projects. And our Vision, to be a consolidated reference in the European and NAFTA markets, offering our clients complete solutions, innovating in products and services.
Where is the focus and market niche set?
Initially the focus was on the strongest OEM car manufacturers in Europe (Renault, Seat, VW…) that had integrated the manufacturing of these elements. Therefore, they had stamping and assembly production sections.
Where does a company like MB provide differential value in a sector as competitive as the automotive industry?
On the one hand, there is the knowledge of the production process necessary for the assembly of these parts and their corresponding joining technologies, as well as the design of the tools involved in each process and the necessary industrial equipment. On the other hand, knowledge of each customer’s standards for their implementation also makes a difference.
And in this process, what role does Robotics and Automation play in your processes?
All production processes involved in the assembly of body parts are automated with a minimum intervention of manual operations that is decreasing and making extensive use of industrial robots.
At what point of maturity would you say your company is in terms of R&A implementation?
We have to follow the philosophy of our customers, who develop in their respective research and prototyping centers such technologies.
As part of Robotekin, what can a company like MB contribute, and what do you expect from such an ecosystem?
What I think we can contribute, above all, is our experience in the design of automation of industrial production processes for the automotive market and potentially in other environments where they share concepts. The expectation is to receive what is being done in other environments and its applicability in our own, and even to learn about new environments where we can develop.
From your experience in the automotive sector in the Basque Country, how do you see the impact of robotics in the current industry and what significant changes do you expect in the coming years in the BAC?
Above all, we expect the contribution of new technologies (read artificial vision, virtual models or collaborative robots), whose impact will go in the direction of facilitating heavy manual work or eliminating manual labor and increasing the total quality control of the process. In this context, the biggest challenge facing all players in the sector is to keep up to date with new applications and to be brutally competitive with the new players in Asia in order to maintain a certain market share, which is always lower than the current one. Therefore, also the search for new opportunities outside the automotive sector.
In addition to Robotekin, you are also part of BAM (Basque Automotive Manufacturing Center), a strategic project of País closely linked to the future of the automotive industry. What role does MB play and for what purpose?
Being founding partners of BAM together with Mercedes and Gestamp, we contribute with our technical knowledge to complement their needs, and we jointly define the strategic lines of the future in order to be a reference in advanced manufacturing technologies and a specialized training point.
Would you share with us a recent success story at MB…?
I would especially mention projects where we have applied virtual models to accelerate the commissioning of complex installations by number of robots.
Do you think that the lack of specialized AI talent is affecting in any way the adoption of these technologies (R&A) by Basque companies?
We don’t have that point of view today at MB Sistemas. AI has to mature and locate upstream and it will certainly arrive sooner rather than later in specific areas of our business. There are many small companies, on the other hand, that are dedicated to the development of specific applications that we will not be able to do, but we will be users of them.
Not getting on the Robotics and Automation train is a symptom of…
… Of not understanding the keys of an important sector in our country and demanding competitiveness based in part on new R&A technologies in order to maintain a part of what we are today thanks to what our predecessors developed long ago, but now the speed that is printed seems much higher.
