Page 20 - Packaging News magazine May-June 2022

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FOOD PACKAGING | www.packagingnews.com.au | May-June 2022
Handled with care
Fibre King delivered a full turnkey conveying, robotic palletising and pallet handling solution for Australian agribusiness DA Hall & Co. PKN takes a closer look at the project.
QUEENSLAND-BASED DA Hall is in the business of egg production, so as an important requirement, Fibre King’s solution had to be gentle enough to handle the delicate, yet weighty product, as well as meet throughput demand at the egg pro- ducer’s Millmerran facility.
Originally, the plans included a new factory build with imported equipment, however, with the onset of Covid, the company needed to look for a domestic solution.
“Fibre King managed to provide a solution that was not only tailor made for our site, but brought us along on the journey using 3D modelling for us to understand what we were going to get before we moved forward with them,” said Don Trefz, general man- ager of DA Hall.
“One of the biggest challenges when finding a suitable solution was to fit two [egg grading] machines into one build, and convey the eggs into one point for palletising; but not only that, the solution had to pack different
product systems – caged, organic, free range, pasture raised, open range – and into export SKUs, local SKUs, egg sizes and more.
“Fibre King had to come up with a system that could pack those eggs, which we put into 131 different types of cartons, and still go onto one stan- dard Chep pallet.
“No one can underestimate the amount of work that goes on in the back- ground, that they had to put together to provide the solution to us within the quotation period, let alone to actually turn it into practice,” Trefz said.
PHASE ONE
The first phase was to deliver the conveyors to merge all the product from the existing grader from MOBA with the new grader that was to be delivered.
It involved installing a high-level conveyor, along with spiral elevators and lowerators, as well as merging and gapping equipment to distribute the cartons from those two graders to four
BELOW: Fibre King delivered a full turnkey conveying, robotic palletising and pallet handling solution in two phases, which worked in with DA Hall’s production schedule and integrated with existing as well as new machinery.
new, fixed size taping machines, and one existing random taping unit.
From there, it was merged again onto a single line for distribution through to manual palletising.
At the end of phase one, which allowed a very small window for installation, Fibre King managed to get the plant up and running in under 24 hours, and enabled DA Hall to achieve higher efficiencies on the taping side of their business, while still being able to manually palletise.
PHASE TWO
The second phase of the project was to install the robotic palletising sys- tem and the distribution conveyors to deliver to that palletising system. Within another small window of approximately 15 hours, Fibre King installed a DARB conveyor from Intralox, which was to act as a bypass to the initial phase until the system went live.
Over the course of three weeks, Fibre King installed the three robot cells, pallet handling system, and the shuttle outfeed system to feed the Fromm stretch wrapper.
From there, the robot cells were commissioned one at a time, slowly taking the load off the manual pal- letising system, which was in place while the installation was underway.
Once the robotic palletising system was up and running in full, the man- ual palletising was only utilised for overflow products in excess of the 12 SKUs that the robots were handling.
... we used to run 365 days a year and we managed to bring that down to a five day a week operation, while increasing production targets.”