By his own admission, Chris Crowley, executive vice president and treasurer of Polar Beverages (Worcester, MA) operates an aging plant. However, he and his brother, Ralph Jr., make the most of the space and facilities, including an innovative palletizing configuration.

“Companies tend to be very good at manufacturing,” observes Chris. “These days, the emphasis is on logistics—moving products internally.” For Polar Beverages, this means focusing on activities such as palletizing. “We have remotely located all of our palletizers to one central location, which are nearer to the dock doors,” he explains. All of the conveyors lead to this palletizing area. Currently, the facility has the capacity and capability on the front of the line to convert to a 2x6 palletizing configuration, and, at some point, according to Chris, the palletizer area will be set up to do this.

Speed and Reliability
According to Steve Fleming, director of sales for Wulftec (Ayers Cliff, Quebec, Canada) location is an important key to gaining productivity and cost savings from palletizing operations. However, the speed of the individual pieces of equipment are also critical. “Our newest high speed system is our wring wrapper, Model WRING,” he says. The WRING can get up to 50 rpms, using a one-way wrap pattern. It can wrap up to 120 loads per hour (one every 30 seconds) and also has versatility for different wrap patterns.

Reliability is also an important key, according to Fleming. “A lot of people say that they want speed,” he observes. “However, after talking with them, you find that what they really want more than speed is reliability. They want to know that the wrapper won’t give them any problems during production hours.” Wulftec’s most popular product for beverage operations is still the WCRT-200 stretch wrapper, which features a heavy-duty structure that is designed to prevent breakdowns.

Another contributor to productivity and cost reduction is ease of maintenance. “We manufacture our products with industrial-grade components that can typically be purchased through any local supplier,” explains Fleming. “This eliminates the need for the customer to purchase proprietary parts through us.” This, obviously, increases the speed at which maintenance and repair can occur. It also allows easy access to all components for trouble-free maintenance.

Robotics
The ultimate in improved productivity, though, may be robotics. “With the increasing number of unique and random sizes and shapes of bottles these days, we are seeing increased interest from customers in robotics for bottle loading,” reports Bill Buck, director of marketing for Schneider Packaging Equipment (Brewerton, NY). “In general, customers are interested in robotics because of the improved labor efficiency and reducing injury to workers.”

To be more specific, robotics provides a significant amount of flexibility in terms of being able to handle different shapes and sizes in an efficient manner. And, according to Buck, as the technology improves, robots are becoming a cost-effective solution.

In its robot line, Schneider offers single-line palletizing systems, multi-line palletizing systems, bag palletizing systems, robotic case packing, and ROBOX Vi (vision-guided robotics). Of these, according to Buck, the multi-line palletizing systems seem to be of particular interest to beverage operations, because of the increased efficiencies they create by combining lines into one central palletizing area.

The ROBOX Vi robotics system is gaining usage upstream in beverage facilities, where it is involved in handling empty bottles. “It uses ‘vision’ to randomly pick and grab a pattern from a blow mold,” explains Buck.

Another company offering robotics palletizing is Westfalia Technologies (York, PA). Westfalia offers the Fuji Robotic Palletizer and the KUKA Robotic Palletizer. The Fuji offers speeds up to 26 cycles per minute. The KUKA features high reliability (mean time between failures of 70,000 hours), low maintenance (every 10,000 hours), and long-term performance (it can be reprogrammed to perform additional functions or completely new tasks).

westfaliausa.com • schneiderequip.com • wulftec.com

From Beverage World August 15, 2007