More efficient packaging at Alpagro thanks to a cobot installation!
- Consumer goods
- Food & beverages
- Printing industry
- Collaborative robots
For more than 45 years, Alpagro has been the Belgian specialist in custom flexible packaging. Founded as 'Alpagro Plastics' in 1979, the family business has grown into an expert in sustainable packaging. It started out producing carrier bags for retail customers, but today its factory in Houthalen-Helchteren also produces fruit and vegetable packaging, shipping packaging and industrial packaging every day. Alpagro is now run by the next generation, but CEO Laurenz Vincke's focus remains unchanged: 'We keep innovating, modernising and optimising our existing products.'
Case
Producing efficiently while meeting the high quality standards of the packaging industry is a daily reality at Alpagro. To increase productivity further and relieve operators of repetitive handling, Laurenz was looking for a solution that could be integrated seamlessly behind one of their packaging machines.
The machine in question produces conical packaging for flowers and lettuce, among other things. At the bottom of each bag is a strip that, until recently, an operator had to remove by hand before the packaging could be placed in a box. This was not only labour-intensive but also a bottleneck in the production process.
Solution
In close collaboration with Alpagro, we developed a cobot set-up that fully automates this process. We chose a FANUC CRX-10iA cobot equipped with an OnRobot clamp gripper.
The cobot is strategically positioned opposite the chain conveyor, so that the gripper can pick up the stacks of bags on both sides of the chain. The bags are then automatically guided to a strip-removal machine. This is an existing installation of the customer that Elenco integrated into the new machine set-up. Here, the strip at the bottom of the packaging is removed.
The cobot then places the packs of conical bags in a staggered arrangement inside cardboard boxes, creating an optimal stacking pattern and filling the boxes efficiently. For this, we developed a user-friendly software application so that an operator can make adjustments themselves (pick-up positions, number of packs per box, stacking order, …) without any prior knowledge of robot or software programming!
The result
This automation delivers a noticeable efficiency gain for Alpagro. Operators are relieved of repetitive tasks and can focus on quality control and setting up other machines. At the same time, production capacity can be increased in the future without increasing the workload for the operator.
