Palletizing is an extremely physical and manual process. It involves arranging stacks of boxes, bags, or cartons onto pallets in readiness for shipping to the market.
This is one of the processes that has gained significantly from automation with collaborative robots. Robots have made the process fast and easy. In addition, automating palletizing has significantly lowered the involvement of hard manual labor and helped maintain the quality of goods before they are ready for shipping.
The main advantages of palletizing robots
Speed
When used at the workplace, palletizing robots ensure that the palletizing process is competed faster and properly.
At a factory, a robot can be programmed to stack a particular number of boxes for each row and column. Like every other robot, it carries out its functions in speed and accuracy.
With the importance of palletizing at a factory, it is important that they acquire a palletizing robot. In addition to time, it will also lower production costs and thus reflect on the factory’s products.
Good for human workers
Palletizing as a part of the production process cannot be carried out by a single person. Automating it is one of the best business solutions that a factory could make.
Palletizing robots ensure that human workers are not lifting heavy objects for long days. This helps improve their health and morale to offer more at work. Healthy workers are more productive and co-operative with each other.
In addition, the robots help employees working in palletizing. With its speed, their productivity increases and they are able to see the impact of their work to the organization.
Lowers cost
Robots can easily lift heavy goods and their speed can help lower the turnaround time of a specific process. Manual palletizing for example requires a large number of people working in tandem to pallet boxes of finished boxes in a provided shape.
Robots significantly reduce the number of people required for palletizing. The excess number of factory employees can be deployed to other factory situations that require more hands.
Further, by reducing heavy lifting, the factory also reduces the amount of health insurance costs that they incur when their workers are injured.
Reduces damaged goods
Manual palletizing leads to lots of losses through damage. As human workers strive to maximize on their work hours, they may not be too keen to ensure the safety of the products that they are palletizing. Consequently, there is bound to be much damage on the products.
The robot on the other hand, is quite gentle to the products even with enhanced speeds. It ensures that all products are handled with care. This reduces the occurrence of damaged goods. This leads to increased sales of high-quality products. This the translates to more sales and profits to the organization.
Easy to program
Modern collaborative palletizing robots are easy to use and program. Palletizing requires that factories set the number of boxes or cartons on a pallet. This can be fed into the robot together with the pallet pattern. The robot will then automatically carry out the instructions provided.
Working with another robot or a human factory worker, the robot will then change over to another pallet once the one it is working on is full according to the set pattern.
They can work with a range of products
Different companies bag their final product differently. Some use bags while others use cartons. Others also use crates or any other packing material suitable for the product.
With suitable end of arm tooling, palletizing robots can easily handle any packaging material that the factory uses. Suitable end of arm tooling enables the robot to hold different packaging materials easily and move them from one point to another with ease and safety.
Conclusion
Palletizing robots are an essential part of automating the production process. Palletizing is an important process to any organization as it is the last stage before products are shipped to market. It should therefore be handled with care as its end result is what the customers receive.