CHEP has innovation all wrapped up

Australian manufacturer Cerebos produces brands such as Fountain, Saxa, Gravox and Toby’s Estate Coffee. The company recently embarked on a full-scale upgrade to its Sydney factory, which was built in 1971.

The company’s General Manager for the ANZ Supply Chain, Joseph Dalo, has a focus on continuous improvement and innovation. As part of the upgrade, he extended an innovation challenge to CHEP.

“Part of our relationship is to talk about continuous improvement. I asked ‘What can we do next?’ so the CHEP team came in and did an audit. I gave the guys fairly free rein and said, ‘What are the opportunities for us?’,” Dalo said.

CHEP recognised a clear opportunity to improve throughput by upgrading the existing stretch wrap machine, which wasn’t meeting existing requirements.

“It was like Pitt Street with everyone lining up for the wrapper,” Dalo jokes.

CHEP recommended the new Lantech SLA4000. With a capacity of 120 pallets per hour, it is claimed to be the highest-speed wrapper on the market.

The machine integrated seamlessly with the Cerebos operations and will ultimately facilitate 17 lines feeding into the single wrapper.

“It’s part of our overall strategy. Pallets will come down the line and go straight through the wrapper. It had to be quick enough to make sure it could keep pulling the pallets through. We have a stretch wrapper now that can handle our capacity. As soon as the pallets are manufactured they’re wrapped, put away and the job is done,” said Dalo.

The new arrangement reduces the number of forklift movements on the factory floor, resulting in a safer workplace. The wrapper also integrates with Cerebos’ existing warehouse management software, automatically generates labels and applies them to the exterior of the wrapped pallet load. This has improved inventory accuracy and reduced damage and ‘miss picks’ through mislabelling.

The wrapper is also more energy efficient than its predecessors, which means savings on energy costs - and from an environmental point of view, less wrap means lower carbon emissions.

“Cerebos is a signatory to the Australian Packaging Covenant and we’ve committed to reducing our packaging each year - the wrapper enables us to reduce packaging,” Dalo said.

While Cerebos could have chosen another provider or an outright purchase, the company opted to go with CHEP for a number of reasons.

“I look at a relationship in terms of value add. Everyone can do price. It’s what you can do next - it’s about the value add. This stretch wrapper is a classic example of that. There’s no capital outlay, and it’s an integrated solution. The service agreement means it’s fully maintained because it includes servicing and film. It helps us because we don’t have to worry about it - CHEP does!” Dalo said