Robot palletising has increased efficiency and ensured stable production

For many years, Crispy Food Nordic handled packing lines with manual palletising. However, increased international demand and plans for further growth created a need to optimise production.

For Danny Berg, Technical Manager at Crispy Food, it was crucial to implement an automation solution that could ensure more stable production with increased productivity:

”We have achieved a completely different stability and calmness in production because our employees no longer have to handle manual palletising. They have more time to focus on other parts of production, and this means we have fewer production line shutdowns and, consequently, higher efficiency,” says Danny Berg, Technical Manager.

The automatic palletising system has also improved the work environment. Heavy lifting during manual palletising has been eliminated, and internal pallet transport has been optimised. This has created more space around the filling machines, allowing workstations to be arranged more efficiently and ergonomically.

”It means a lot to our employees' well-being that heavy lifting is gone, and they now have more space to move around. It creates happy and more motivated employees, and it positively affects production efficiency,"

Danny Berg, Technical Manager

The process of developing and implementing the solution has been based on close collaboration with a focus on high information levels and good dialogue. The final optimisation solution was developed after a thorough analysis of production processes to find the right solution for automatic palletising. What makes this palletising system unique is a built-in tilting station in the lanes, which rotates selected boxes so that they can be placed upright on the pallet. Palletising upright is not a typical maneuver in robot palletising, but for Crispy Food, it was the solution to meet requirements for pallet packing before transport.

The transition from manual to automated production may seem complicated when starting, but for Technical Manager Danny Berg, it has been a positive process: The weekly status meetings with the project team at BILA provided ongoing information and overview throughout the entire process, and it also allowed for immediate responses to specific challenges. It gave Crispy Food the freedom to focus on the daily operations of the production because they knew that the project team had control over the implementation of the project.

Crispy Food is not done with automation in production. On the contrary. Active collaboration with BILA is ongoing regarding potential business cases and development projects that will form the basis for future automation projects at the leading food manufacturer.