How a Russian Furniture Maker Added 50% Capacity With One Welding Robot

At a Glance

The Challenge: A Growing Online Business, a Stubbornly Fixed Ceiling

When I walked into this manufacturer's workshop in Russia, the first thing I noticed wasn't a machine — it was the rhythm. Six welders working steadily, shoulder to shoulder, each one focused on a chair frame in front of them. Sparks, the hiss of arc welding, stacks of finished steel frames building up against the wall. It was genuinely impressive. These were skilled people doing hard, repetitive work.

The business itself had grown to around 10 million Russian rubles in monthly revenue, driven almost entirely by online sales. That's a real success story. But the owner walked me through the math: orders were still climbing, the product was selling well, and yet the production line simply could not move faster. Six welders working as hard as they could was still six welders. They couldn't weld faster without sacrificing quality, and they couldn't work longer hours indefinitely.

The product — steel tube chair frames — is actually one of the most repetitive welding jobs I see in this segment. Each frame has the same joints, the same geometry, the same weld paths, over and over. The bottleneck was visible the moment I stepped inside. The owner hadn't seriously considered automation before our visit, but once we stood in front of the line together and talked through the numbers, it became clear that this wasn't a labor problem — it was a system design problem.

Why This Customer Needed a Robot, Not More Welders

The instinct for many SME owners in this situation is to hire. Add a seventh welder, then an eighth. I understand the logic — it feels controllable. But I've had this conversation with enough factory owners to know where it leads.

Manual welders turn over. Experienced ones are increasingly hard to find. Each new hire brings a slightly different hand, a slightly different rhythm, and variation in weld quality that shows up in your reject rate and your rework costs. When your product is sold online, customer reviews notice inconsistency. One bad batch can hurt a rating you spent years building.

More fundamentally: hiring more people to do a fundamentally repetitive task is not a scalable answer when you're growing. The geometry of a steel chair frame doesn't change. The weld path doesn't change. This customer had a product tailor-made for robotic welding — fixed part geometry, high volume, consistent material — and they were staffing it like it was a custom fabrication shop. That mismatch was the real problem, and adding a seventh welder wouldn't fix it.

The Solution: SZGH Welding Robot + Positioner

The solution we deployed is one I've recommended many times for exactly this application: an SZGH welding robot paired with a positioner (变位机).

The robot handles the arc welding paths — the same seams, joint by joint, frame by frame, with consistent torch angle, travel speed, and wire feed. No fatigue, no variation. On a repetitive structure like a chair frame, a properly programmed welding robot can run the same cycle hundreds of times with virtually identical output.

The positioner is what makes this practical. A chair frame has weld joints on multiple faces and angles. Without a positioner, you'd need the robot to reach awkward orientations, or a human to reposition the part mid-weld. The positioner rotates and tilts the workpiece under the robot's torch, keeping the weld joint in the optimal position at every step of the cycle — no manual intervention needed between welds.

Because the positioner connects natively to the SZGH controller, the robot and positioner move as a coordinated system. The operator loads a frame, starts the cycle, and the system does the rest. On chair frame geometries like this one, a single robot-plus-positioner cell replaces the output of two to three manual welders on the same parts. The projected result for this customer: a 50% increase in production capacity and output volume, without expanding the workforce.

The Factory Visit

I want to say something about the factory visit itself, because I think it matters.

We don't sell robots remotely into situations we haven't seen. When the owner first encountered SZGH at an exhibition, they were interested — but the real conversation happened when our team visited the workshop in Russia. We walked the floor together. We looked at the steel tube processing area, the manual welding stations, the stacks of finished painted frames in dark grey and black lined up near the loading area. We watched the welders work.

That visit is where trust gets built. The owner could see that we understood their production line, not just our own product. We could see the actual part geometry, the floor space, the workflow between tube processing and frame assembly. No amount of brochure review or video call replaces being in the room. For SME customers taking their first step into automation, that in-person assessment is part of how SZGH works — and it's how I personally prefer to work. I'd rather spend a day in your factory and give you the right recommendation than close a sale on a solution that doesn't fit.

What's Next: A Full Automation Roadmap

What I find genuinely exciting about this customer is that they're not treating this as a one-off equipment purchase. Before we even finished the initial deployment discussions, the owner was already thinking about the next three phases.

First: robot loading and unloading for their laser tube cutting machine. Right now, that process is manual — someone feeds and removes steel tubes from the laser cutter. A loading robot would automate that handoff entirely. Second: additional welding robots as production scales. One cell getting them to 50% more capacity is the proof of concept; if that works — and it will — the logical step is to add cells. Third: a painting and spraying robot to automate the finishing process. The stacks of dark-painted frames I saw in that workshop are currently finished by hand. Robotic spraying would give them consistent coating quality and free up more labor for higher-value tasks.

This is the automation roadmap arc I see with the best SME customers: one successful deployment, immediate confidence, and a clear-eyed plan for what comes next.

Results Summary

Is Your Production Line Ready for Automation?

If you run a small or medium manufacturing operation with repetitive welding, handling, or finishing work — and you're hitting the same ceiling this customer hit — SZGH can visit your factory or assess your process remotely. We've worked with manufacturers in 126 countries since 2013, and the conversation always starts the same way: tell us what you make, and let's look at the line together.

By Fannie Chen, CEO, Shenzhen Guanhong Automation Co., Ltd. (SZGH) | June 2026

Page last reviewed: June 2026 | Shenzhen Guanhong Automation Co., Ltd. | szghtech.com

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