Things to consider before switching to palletizing automation

When plan­ning to switch your ​“end-of-the-line” appli­ca­tion from man­u­al oper­a­tion to an auto­mat­ed option, there are sev­er­al things that you should con­sid­er to pre­pare your facil­i­ty for the change.

First, you should con­sid­er if you want your pal­letiz­ing robot­ic sys­tem to per­form one task or many simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. A sin­gle piece of robot equip­ment could sim­ply load crates onto a pal­let, or it could pack­age prod­ucts, load box­es onto a pal­let, and wrap the pal­let with shrink wrap.

Anoth­er con­sid­er­a­tion is the amount of mon­ey you will spend vs the amount of mon­ey a robot­ic pal­letiz­er will save you in the long run. Robot­ic pal­letiz­ers can han­dle a vary­ing amount of pack­ages and can han­dle those pack­ages at a speed of 60 – 70 cas­es per minute. If that kind of speed will increase your facility’s pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and low­er pro­duc­tion costs, your return on invest­ment (ROI) should also increase.

Your facility’s lay­out needs to be con­sid­ered as well. Man­u­fac­tur­ers need to decide if their facil­i­ty will be able to han­dle a floor mount­ed robot, or if they will be bet­ter suit­ed with a shelf mount­ed or a ceil­ing mount­ed unit.

The appli­ca­tion itself is some­thing to con­sid­er when decid­ing on pal­letiz­ing automa­tion. There could be some types of prod­ucts that ben­e­fit from the gen­tler, con­sis­tent han­dling of robots over man­u­al pal­letiz­ing applications.

Safe­ty is a huge con­sid­er­a­tion when look­ing into pal­letiz­ing robot automa­tion. Man­u­al pal­letiz­ing can be tedious and dan­ger­ous. By automat­ing pal­letiz­ing sys­tems, man­u­fac­tur­ers can decrease labor costs. Pal­letiz­ing robots and work­cells also need safe­ty devices in place when oper­at­ing in a facil­i­ty to keep work­ers out of the dan­ger zone when the robot is moving.

Man­u­fac­tur­ers should con­sid­er train­ing when con­sid­er­ing automa­tion. They will need to have work­ers to run the new robot sys­tems. While robot pal­letiz­ers might take human work­ers away from man­u­al pal­letiz­ing, they can be trained to oper­ate the robots with some easy, push but­ton oper­a­tor sta­tions to make com­plex func­tions user-friendly.

Robots​.com, a cer­ti­fied inte­gra­tor of Fanuc, ABB, Uni­ver­sal Robots, Motoman, and KUKA robots, has engi­neers and design­ers to work with you through all the con­sid­er­a­tions to find the pal­letiz­ing robot­ic sys­tem that is best for you.

For more infor­ma­tion about automat­ing your pal­letiz­ing sys­tem with Robots​.com, call us today at 877−762−6881 or con­tact rep­re­sen­ta­tive online.