Kotzur is a leading manufacturer of bulk solids storage and handling facilities for the agricultural, mining and manufacturing sectors. All of their products are designed and manufactured in Australia, for Australian conditions.
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Client Requirements
In 2024, Kotzur’s Toowoomba facility began investigating robotic welding to help address skilled welding labour challenges, and to enable their welders to focus on more specialised and complicated work.
This advancement also supports their ongoing 60 year commitment to high-quality Australian-made products, as well as enabling improvement of worker safety through technologies such as integrated fume extraction.
A key challenge when considering robot welding was their high-mix production.
We don’t require single production runs of thousands of units. It could be 10 to 20 parts we want to weld. We have a large number of products and jigs.
Solution
As with any initiative, external support from industry experts was a key consideration when planning the installation. Kotzur elected to work with Infinite Robotics, who installed a custom designed dual-station FANUC welding cell to suit their need for flexible but efficient production.
“Infinite Robotics is very experienced and has always been good, for the whole process of purchasing, commissioning, and operating”.
As part of the solution, Infinite recommended our Verbotics Weld software to meet their high-mix programming needs.
Results
The robot system installed in mid-2025 is now a key part of Kotzur’s production. Even before the robot was installed, the Verbotics software allowed them to design and procure jigs with a 4-month lead time with confidence: “being able to use Verbotics before getting the robot helped us to be able to have jigs ready and prepared for when the robot got here”.
The software was easy to learn and enable quickly producing new robot programs.
I did find it pretty quick and easy. Within a day I felt like I was an experienced user.
For a program that might take one day of robot time, we can achieve it with Verbotics in an hour and a half.
The software is also a key communication tool for information between the drafting and production teams, enabling clear communication between the drafting team and the welders and people who make the products on the shop floor.
Verbotics Weld eliminates downtime while producing programs for different models. “I can make changes while they’re unloading and loading the next part, and then you can have the new program there ready for the next cycle”.
The software also enables flexible use of their dual station workcell, with the ability to seamlessly transfer a program from one side of the robot workcell to the other.
Future
Kotzur plans to continue to expand their robotic capabilities by investigating technologies to enhance existing through-arc-seam-tracking to robotically weld more variable products. They have already started on the next robotic welding install at their Toowoomba facility.
