Palletising System - Including Track & Trace

Challenge 

Oceania Dairy approached RML with the challenge of automating a manual case packing and palletising process. The process includes an operator picking and placing eight 1kg foil pouches of milk powder into RSC shipping cases, and then manually palletising these cases onto a pallet. Within the scope of the challenge, Oceania had requested the track and trace of all pouches from the filling room into the cases, and then onto the pallets, ensuring the traceability of the product throughout the process for quality purposes. 

Solution 

The solution included a customised Automated RSC Top Load Case Packer integrating automated product laning, RSC erecting, robotic loading (via the RML hawk robotic loading system) and tape closing system to load the foil milk powder pouches into the cases and close them for palletising. 

During the packing process, the products and cases are tracked through the case packer. The products are scanned as they are loaded into the cases, moved through the closing section of the equipment, checked weighed, and applied with a label that contains the information of each pouch such as weight and other critical production information. 

The closed cases are then conveyed to the palletising system where the cases are scanned and collated. An ABB Industrial Robot picks the collated cases from the conveyor and places them on a pallet in a pre-determined pattern. The robot layers the cases on top of one another until the pallet is full. Once full, the pallets are then conveyed to staging zones, collating full pallets that can be called for by the forklift operator if needed, or, collated until the conveyor is full of pallets of cases. 

Pallets are fed into the palletising cell as stacks of 10. When a full pallet is completed and moves from the palletising conveyor, the ABB robot locates and picks a pallet from the stack and places it at the palletising conveyor. The ABB robot picks a slip sheet from a slip sheet magazine and places it over the pallet prior to palletising.  

Once the pallets have been completed, the traceability data held by the equipment for pouches in cases and cases on pallets is pushed onto the Industrial Control System for quality purposes.