George Weston Foods (GWF) has built what's believed to be the country's largest robotic palletising project.
GWF has installed an array of 16 palletising robots, supplied by ABB, at its production facility in Castlemaine, Victoria. GWF employs around 8000 people at nearly 60 sites across the country.
Its Castlemaine production site produces a wide range of smallgoods, which are supplied to consumers through the retail food service and small distributor network.
The factory is divided into four key plants: ham, bacon, salami and continental smallgoods. Each of these production areas is serviced by a shared palletiser and distribution service.
The 16 ABB robots serve 32 packaging lines, collecting over 450 different products at the rate of about 9000 cartons per hour, coming from four different packing areas.
Some 27 lines and more than a kilometre of conveyor bring products into the palletising cell, in which the ABB robots serve 32 pallet stations, with another robot at the front of the station preparing the pallets.
At the end of the lines, two rail systems with four shuttles deposit the finished pallets at two stretch wrapper stations, which wrap more than 100 loaded pallets an hour and feed them to the automated guided vehicles (AGVs).
GWF Castlemaine operation packaging team leader, Troy Thomas, says the enormous operation was designed chiefly to eliminate challenges presented by the company's previously manual palletising operations.
"I think the defining factor was knowing that we could eliminate a lot of manual handling and remove a fair bit of the labour cost associated with the manual handling," he says.
GWF supply chain manager Kim Martin says the project also had the needs of the company's retail customers in mind."We had challenges with retailers in terms of making sure the consistency and quality of the pallets was what they required for their automated networks,” Martin says.
“And like everyone else, we also had increasing labour costs and concerns about our ability to make the productivity targets we needed in order to remain competitive.”
Martin says the market trend is towards smaller, more shelf-ready pack sizes.
"Obviously that increases the repetitiveness of the tasks the team here needed to do, therefore increasing our OHS risk as well, which is probably the main risk that we have on site,” she says.
Barry Hendy, general manager of ADDE, which designed and built the system, says the ABB equipment was chosen because of the speed and accuracy requirements of the project.
The configuration was based on the speed of the individual lines, he says, which dictated the solution of 16 robots serving 32 pallet stations.
