September 17 2015
Conveyor Systems and Robotic Palletizers Do the Heavy Lifting in Dairy Plants
Article by Jim Carper, Editor in Chief, Dairy Foods
Every company has different business models but are faced with the same challenge; implementing physical and operational changes without affecting the customer. With automation being a solution many industries are using to combat this challenge, the question arises, what can automation do for dairies?
Dairy Foods asked this very question in a recent article featuring Westfalia Technologies’ Fred Beer, president of Deam Systems. Beer offers many recommendations throughout the article for dairy plant managers on how to effectively select equipment and how automation will eventually affect the industry.
He recommends having low-value work be performed by machines, which allows workers to do higher level tasks. He also suggests that dairies should use chain types that are suited for high-pressure washdowns. Beer ends his recommendations with this statement about automated systems, “Today, systems are available to store/retrieve and automatically release full pallet loads, full stacks and even single dairy cases. Warehouse Execution Systems capable of handling all operations in a dairy warehouse/cooler will continue to expand, thereby helping reduce order processing time, improve order accuracy and reduce waste. Robotic palletizing systems with the capability of building loads with mixed SKU cases will eliminate many of the case/stack conveyors and most of the manual labor in the load-out process. AGVs [automated guided vehicles] will be used to load/unload trucks.”
To read the full article posted by Dairy Foods, click here
To learn more about the capabilities of case packing and handling equipment, click here