Project Description

Premier Beverage Manufacturer Saves Cost by Implementing Palletizing System

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The customer acquired additional business resulting in the production of a new juice product line. The customer was interested in automation solutions including robotic palletizing. The current process included labor intensive manual palletizing of the juice product.

The completed pallet patterns and loads were not always square at the end of the process. This resulted in problems with pallet placement in storage racking and loading of trucks.

Manual corrections to the pallet load had to be made by forklift operators. The employees also had minimal floor space to work within.

We provided a turnkey solution which included design, build, and commissioning on the customer site. The new process equipment installed provided a system capable of a higher throughput rate and consisted of: two case infeeds, two pallet outfeeds, a pallet dispenser, a FANUC robotic palletizer, and a Wulftec WCA-Smart stretch wrapper.

The automated palletizing solution greatly improved pallet build quality and process ergonomics as no manual corrections were required by operators. The higher throughput rate equals 5 cases per minute on one in/out and either 32oz (27 trays per minute) or 10oz (20 trays per minute) on the previous line.

The FANUC M-410iB/140H’s versatility, speed and range makes it the best option for case palletizers such as in this application. It’s 5 axis robotic arm will allow it to cope with any palletizing application and package types.