Development of Custom Servo Drives for Conveyors

Project in Nutshell: We helped a conveyor supplier reduce its servo procurement costs by 30% by developing a customised solution. A one-time investment in such a design will save tens of millions of euros on off-the-shelf purchases and generate revenue in the long term through repair and maintenance services for conveyor end-users.

Client & Challenge

Our client specialises in conveyor manufacturing, where servo drives are a vital component. Procurement of off-the-shelf servo drives took up to 20% of the budget, sometimes reaching several tens of millions of dollars per year. The more servos are integrated into the end device, the higher the cost of purchasing third-party servos provided by Siemens, Yaskawa, or ABB.

In addition, customers and end users of our client's solutions — production lines and factories — often stopped cooperation after the end of the warranty period. When a conveyor servo drive failed, they usually replaced it themselves, purchasing an alternative bypassing our client.

Our client wanted to address two challenges with its branded solution: to reduce the cost of purchasing off-the-shelf servo drives and to retain its customers.

Solution

The Promwad team made a preliminary calculation and obtained the following results:

	Buying off-the-shelf motor drives	Designing your custom motor drives
Expenses	10–20% of the total value of one conveyor	2–5% of the purchasing expenses for off-the-shelf motor drives — 30% cheaper than an off-the-shelf analogue
Customer retention and loyalty	NO. If a motor drive fails, the owner of the machine replaces it with a market analogue without contacting you	YES. Only you have specialised knowledge and components for your custom motor drives to provide maintenance services
Payback	Not Applicable. You will be dependent on third-party vendors and their pricing	3–6 months, depending on the annual production volume of your conveyor

Development of servo drive under the customer's brand includes:

requirements analyses;

mechanical design;

creation of electronic circuits;

selection of suitable components;

software development;

prototyping;

testing and optimisation;

preparation of design documentation;

preparation for serial production;

implementation and support.

Business Value

By investing in a project to develop servo drives for conveyors, our client gained the following benefits:

A 30% reduction in servo purchase costs due to the lower cost of custom servos compared to off-the-shelf options.

Customer retention and loyalty: our client received a guarantee that end users will come back for replacement or repair of custom servos in their conveyors. Only the original manufacturer has the expertise and parts for custom servos, which promotes long-term service and reduces the likelihood of customers switching to competitors for maintenance.

Quick return on investment. The investment in custom servo drive development will pay off within 3-6 months, depending on the annual conveyor production volume.

The development of custom servo drives and further production of equipment based on them are also beneficial for CNC machine manufacturers. Contact us if you want to implement such a task for your business.

Reach Out

More of What We Do for Industrial Solutions
Design of Motor Control Solutions: explore our expertise in developing motor control solutions such as VFDs, servo drives, multi-axis drives and more.
DC/AC Servo Drives: a case study of developing an AC/DC servo drive according to SIL 3 certification and preparing it for mass production on our client's side.
Top Open-Source Projects to Design MVP: explore our survey of open-source projects for motor control development: STMBL, ODrive, VESK, and EDDP.

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