Size matters - Australia's largest food palletising solution

George Weston Foods (GWF) is one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest food manufacturers, employing around 8000 people at nearly 60 sites. The new GWF production facility in Castlemaine, Victoria, is now home to Australia’s largest robotic palletising system, featuring 16 ABB palletising robots.

The GWF Castlemaine operation produces a wide range of small goods which are supplied to consumers through the retail food service and small distributor networks. The factory is divided into four key plants: ham, bacon, salami and continental smallgoods. Each of these production areas is serviced by a shared palletiser and distribution service.

Sixteen ABB robots serve 32 packaging lines at GWF Castlemaine, making it the biggest robotic palletising system in the country. The palletising line collects over 450 different products at the rate of about 9000 cartons/hour, coming from four different packing areas.

Some 27 lines and more than a kilometre of conveyor bring products into the palletising cell, which has 16 ABB robots serving 32 pallet stations, and another robot at the front of the station preparing the pallets. Finally, two rail systems with four shuttles deposit the finished pallets at two stretch-wrapper stations, which wrap more than 100 loaded pallets an hour and feed them to the automated guided vehicles (AGVs).

“Before implementing the robots the problems we experienced were from manual handling, including occupational, health and safety (OHS) issues, downtime, not getting the products out fast enough, and labour costs,” says GWF packaging team leader Troy Thomas. “I think the defining factor was knowing that we could eliminate a lot of manual handling and remove a fair bit of the labour costs associated with the manual handling.”

George Weston Foods’ palletising line collects over 450 different products at the rate of about 9000 cartons per hour. Photo credit: Eduardo Gil

Kim Martin, GWF’s supply chain manager agrees: “We had challenges with retailers in terms of making sure the consistency and quality of the pallets were what they required for their automated networks. And like everyone else, we also had increasing labour costs and concerns about our ability to reach the productivity targets we needed in order to remain competitive.” The market trend is towards smaller, more shelf-ready pack sizes. “Obviously that increases the repetitiveness of the tasks the team here needed to do, therefore increasing our OHS risk as well, which is probably the main risk that we have on site,” says Martin.

He also reveals that the company upgraded its ability to manage production speed and volume at its central distribution space, and that the installation also brought improvements to worker safety.

“Other improvements include significantly reduced levels of pallet rejections from customers, and the ability to deal smoothly with the production volume now being processed out of this site as each of the facilities has come online,” says Martin. “We have also seen a huge improvement in OHS injuries associated with palletising, because we have largely eliminated that task.”

Melbourne-based Andrew Donald Design Engineering (ADDE) designed and installed the system for GWF. Barry Hendy, ADDE General Manager, knew that ABB robots were a perfect fit for the food producer: “We chose ABB’s IRB 4600 robot because the orientation and positioning of the cartons needed a sixth axis, so we needed the extra dexterity of a 6-axis robot to ensure the stations would be able to handle all of the palletising tasks coming in from the conveyors.” Line configuration was chosen based on the speed of the individual lines. Each automated row is able to look after two lines and maintain the rates on those two lines, which dictates the line configuration of 16 robots, serving the 32 pallet stations.