Getting it together

18 January 2011



Unitising systems handle everything from multipacks to cases and pallets, and the expectations of their users are great, as Joanne Hunter discovers.


Not knowing what demands are waiting around the corner, businesses need their end of line processes to be versatile and speedy. Product bundling, case packing, and stretch wrap and palletising equipment has to prove itself capable of producing safe, secure and strong units for distribution and display purposes. To follow is a sample of machinery clearly designed for the modern high speed production environment.

Italy’s Italdibipack offers its patented Leonardo robotic technology designed to stretch wrap a wide range of palletised loads. The self-propelled robot, which importantly works in ‘very restricted’ areas, has a telescopic column for wrapping pallets up to 2,350mm high. With Leonardo, the company has striven for performance excellence using less material; it can take PE film of thicknesses from 19 to 40 micron and up to 500mm wide. For convenience, the robot is powered by batteries, easily recharged by connecting the on-board charger to a standard electrical outlet and on a single charge will wrap between 60-80 Euro pallets, depending on their size.

Last year, Gordian Strapping, a UK based package and pallet securement specialist, supplied an automatic pallet ring wrapper to the packaging line of Belgian frozen vegetable processor PinguinLutosa, to overcome the costly issue of loose film tails and potential rejection by automated warehousing systems. The Sirio ring wrapper fulfilled expectations with its high production capacities, flexibility of use, extreme robustness and ultra-reliability, says Gordian. Its newest addition, the RQ-7000, similarly offers all that a fast moving business asks for. It will strap at up to 60 bundles/min without sacrificing strap tension.

The space-efficient reel unit design simply slides out from the inside of the body cabinet, to make strap coil loading easy. The reel rotation is stopped by a maintenance-free electromagnetic reel brake instead of a mechanical brake, to provide long term reliability.

When the strap coil runs out, helpfully the machine will automatically eject any remaining strap from inside the machine.

Meanwhile, OMS offers a system designed to bind any type of profile - an automatic strapping machine that uses polypropylene (PP) or polyester (PET) strap for vertical strapping. Also, the French company is promoting a ligature horizontal strapping machine that is ‘space-saving and easily transported’; and a combination machine that uses a single workstation for all product hooding and thermo-shrinking operations, for the glass industry.

In case packing, when speed as well as flexibility is essential to meet retail customer orders, a new Cermex top loader is claimed to ‘deliver the goods’. The SD is the company’s 6-axis parallel link robot aimed at a broad market including food, cosmetics and perfumery, hygiene, pharmaceuticals and health, through to luxury products. Its capabilities so impressed a judging panel at last year’s Emballage in Paris that the SD was ranked among the show’s top innovations. It will accommodate payloads of up to 6kg with cycle times of just 0.3sec. It sets products upright or lays them down, depending on how they are fed into the machine and how they are to be arranged in the case. The outcome is a potentially stronger and more compact final product produced at high speed.

Specialisation hones technical expertise in a particular sector and choosing a quickly growing, fast moving category brings the best of all worlds. French company Polypack has chosen to strategically focus on the chilled and dairy sector with its Fast series of product bundling machines. As the name suggests, this machine range is for users seeking faster speeds to produce, for example, multipacks. Another key factor from a retail customer’s point of view, to improve shelf display the printed shrinkable film is cut to fit and visually inspected for consistent conformity, Polypack’s spokesperson Patricia Thomas tells Packaging Today.

The designers of compact end-of-line operations understand the true worth of every square metre of factory space. Packing the activity into a smaller area not only leaves the floor free for production equipment, but also lets operatives work more efficiently.

One such clever response is the compact configuration of ARP’s Carousel. It comprises eight stations set upon a footprint of just 25m2. It offers a collator, stacker, packer, divider, tray packer, tray maker, tray stacker and elevator, all in a neat parcel. The Carousel can replace a traditional line that would extend to around 30m long, and it is more ergonomic and ecological, claims ARP.

Cheese picks up speed with robot

Arla Foods’ crescent-shaped Castello cheeses are being stacked at full speed and with great precision in a very limited space, thanks to the compact Robot-in-a-box concept by Soco System.

A specialist in end-of-line automation, Soco has based what it thinks is a unique ‘plug and play’ system on an ultra-compact gantry robot. In contrast to the traditional free arm robots, the gantry robot has a much smaller working area without compromising on speed, claims Soco.

Ordered at the beginning of March 2010 and delivered to Arla at the end of June, it was commissioned within a couple of days and is now handling up to 20 cartons/min.

Arla’s Robot-in-a-box has a special multifunctional gripper to be able to lift accumulated cartons from the belt, separate them with only a few centimetres between the pillars and place them precisely. This is to ensure that the finished pallets to be cooled have a uniform temperature in all 571 cartons on the pallet.

A further benefit to the multinational Arla is that the system will handle both UK and EU pallet sizes.

Operators have happily said goodbye to repetitive heavy lifting of cartons high on the pallets, while Arla looks forward to a promised payback in just 18 months.

“We can now spend this time on planning and optimising. We are even able to come up with ideas for Soco System for further improvement of Robot-in-a-box, which means that the co-operation goes both ways,” says Benny Henriksen, Packaging Manager at Arla Foods. He adds that with an annual saving made of DKK 400,000, a second robot is in the budget for 2011, to give operatives on an adjacent packaging line their own ‘workhorse’ to simplify their daily routines.


Gordian Strapping’s Sirio ring wrapper meets the needs of warehousing and distribution. Gordian Gordian’s new RQ-7000 strapping system. RQ Polypack focuses on the chilled and dairy sector with its Fast series bundling machines. Polypack Benny Henriksen, Arla Foods Packaging Manager, with Soco System’s Robot-in-a-box. Arla

RQ RQ
Polypack Polypack
Gordian Gordian
Arla Arla


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