Optimization of space in the production environment
When available space in the production area is limited and there is no desire to sacrifice floor space for automatic palletizing at each line, central palletizing offers an excellent solution. By deploying palletizing robots, significant cost savings can also be achieved, as the robots can simultaneously palletize multiple production lines onto individual pallets.
Additional savings are achieved because the full pallets no longer need to be transported from the production area to the warehouse. The discharge of full, wrapped, and labeled pallets from the central palletizing system can be positioned close to the warehouse.
Implementation at a coffee processing company
At one of the largest coffee processing companies, we automated the palletizing process of their 14 production lines in a central location using our Spider gantry robots.
What makes this solution unique is that the boxes from the production lines are transported to the Spider palletizers via two centrally elevated conveyor belts. This setup offers a major advantage: by sorting the boxes onto the individual infeed conveyors of the palletizing robots, both fast and slow lines can be combined. As a result, the workload is evenly distributed across all robots.
This leads to significant cost savings, as otherwise each production line would require individual palletizing — meaning 14 separate palletizing systems.
With the central solution, however, all lines can be palletized using only 7 robots. A slow and a fast line were paired with each Spider robot, ensuring optimal utilization.
Efficiency of the central conveyor system
What makes the central conveyor system unique is that no barcodes are required on the boxes to sort them to the various robot infeed lanes. The central conveyors were virtually divided into sections, where each box was “married” to a specific section upon being pushed onto the line from production.
The central conveyor lines were set up in a loop configuration. This allows boxes that cannot be processed immediately by the palletizing robots to complete another loop on the conveyor, giving them a new opportunity to be processed on the next pass.
Efficiency Gains and Advantages
The implementation of the central palletizing system has resulted in various savings and benefits for the coffee processing company:
Conclusion
Central palletizing of 14 production lines using Spider gantry robots and central conveyor systems has proven to be an efficient and cost-effective solution for the coffee processing company. By combining slow and fast lines, eliminating the need for barcodes, and implementing a loop-based conveyor setup, significant savings and operational benefits were achieved.
This case study demonstrates that a centralized approach to palletizing not only saves space and costs, but also enhances efficiency and flexibility within the production environment.