Packing and Palletising System

Challenge

Westland Milk Products were faced with a production challenge, which was that they had increasing volumes for one of their products that was currently being packed by a co-packer. Given the cost and reliance on an external resource required for this sort of process, they wanted to bring it back in-house to have more control. After discussion with Westland, the main requirements were that RML had to work with their existing products and packaging and customise a solution that would fit inside their new building while achieving high quality, uptime, and throughput.

Given that this was a relatively standard cartoning machine, we only had to customise the infeed of the cartoner to suit Westland’s product, which meant integrating a new two-axis robot into the front end of the cartoner. We then went with a very specialised pick and place system for the case packing of a display tray alongside a standard RML palletiser.

Solution

The butter pats are loaded onto the infeed of our cartoner, the cartoner then collates up the butter pats and loads them into a carton.  The cartons are then conveyed through to the case packing where they are stood up so that they are shelf-ready. They are side-shifted in three rows of five and then picked and placed into shipper trays in one movement.  Trays are printed for date code and then go through to the palletiser where they are palletised with layer boards between each layer.

 The solution addressed the specific challenges by being a seamless line from operators unpacking the bulk product, going right through to the RML palletiser, and palletising the product ready for wrapping and shipping. This was a turnkey line supplied by RML which made it easy for the customer only dealing with one supplier.

 The benefits of implementing the RML cartoner, case packing, and palletising for Westland was that they got to put the production process back into their cool store so that there was a lot less freight sending their product to the co-packer and then bringing it back once it was packed, which doubled as both a cost and time-saving decision.