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How To Automate the Hand Wrap Function

Have you ever tried wrapping a hundred pallets a night by walking around each pallet 9 or 10 times with an 8 pound roll of
stretch film, and pulling on the film as you go? Let's see, that would be 900 to 1,000 times around the pallet a night
carrying weight and pulling as you go. Doesn't sound like a lot of fun does it? Want to hear more? In many cases you
are expected to bend over and wrap the load to the pallet which requires starting the stretch film about 2 inches off
the warehouse floor. Och! That's got to be bad on the old back. But more, what if you're only 5' 6" ( 66" total ) tall and
the pallet is 84" tall. You have to wrap it all the way to the top, and go around at least twice at the top or the load won't
hold in shipping. Standing on the old tippie toes while you pull a roll of stretch film around the top layer of the pallet a
couple of hundred times a night is also not good for the old back.
Granted most companies with hundreds of pallets to wrap each day would have gone to some kind of stretch machine by
now, but for a number of reasons many distribution companies are still stretch wrapping by hand. It is a proved fact
that placing stand alone stretch machines ( turntables ) on the loading dock of, for example, foodservice companies, can
cause bottlenecks, or traffic jams, as selectors have no where to drop loads as there is a back up at the machines. We
need to find another way to automate than traditional stretch machines.

One stretch film company has sought to introduce several types of machines from Europe that are an attempt to
automate the hand wrap function. These machines are simplified models that only will use pre-stretched hand
wrap. They will loan you a machine to use to pull their pre-stretched hand wrap around the pallet, but you have to commit
to only buying your hand wrap from them. This may be of some help to some people, but it is certainly not the way to
make automating your hand wrap function a value added part of your process.

Ok, how do we automate the hand wrap function. My recommendation is to do it with robot stretch machines that are
fully portable, and can easily move from pallet to pallet as the selectors drop them on the loading dock, and the loader
runs the robots, and places the wrapped pallets on the truck for shipment. A growing number of foodservice companies
have found success with this method. While there is more than one robot available in the US, I am only going to talk
about the one that I am most familiar with, the Wulftec Palwrapper robot.

Click on the Picture to see the Video The Wulftec Palwrapper Robot
l Wulftec 20" Powered Pre-Stretch Carriage
l 6 Separate Wrapper Patterns
l Allen Bradley Micro Logix 1200 PLC
l Allen Bradley Panel View 300 Touch Screen
l 3 year warranty on critical electonics
l Non Proprietary Parts
l Up to 300% Pre-Stretch for Maximum Film Economy
l Lifetime warranty on pre-stretch rollers blue compound
l Can wrap approximately 300 pallets per battery charge
l Can wrap to about 2" from the floor. Ties your load to the pallet.
l Forklift Portable

The Wulftec robot may not be the answer for every situation and I have found that it can work in most. There are even
distribution warehouses with small loading docks who what adapted to the robot quite well, and found that they cannot
live without it. The trick is to place your pallets on the dock so that there is at least 48" or so between them for the
robot to use. The robot can wrap your load just exactly the way you want it wrapped ( tied to the pallet with extra

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