How to Get 75% Higher Palletizing Throughput with Multipick
Collaborative robot palletizing can be the perfect tool to increase the productivity of your end-of-line processes. Compared to manual palletizing, it is more efficient, consistent and scalable.
But there’s one thing that can still be holding you back from getting the productivity you need: number of picks per minute.
For most situations, the robot’s speed is out-of-the-box palletizing solutions more than enough. However, sometimes, you may need a higher throughput than a basic solution can provide.
For this reason, we recently released the multistake feature. This software upgrade allows the robot to select and place multiple cases simultaneously. Multipick can drastically increase the throughput of your palletizing robot, helping you follow faster production lines.
Our customers are already seeing impressive results. One company in the pet food industry achieved 75% higher throughput using the multipick feature.
Here’s how you can use multipick to increase your palletizing throughput.
What is the multipick feature?
The multipick feature is an improvement to our software Robotiq Palletization Solutions. This allows collaborative robots to complete palletizing cycles more quickly by allowing them to take on multiple cases simultaneously.
For example, previously you could only complete uneven palette patterns in Single Selection mode, impacting pallet completion times. Multipick now lets you take advantage of Always Dual Pick mode to increase throughput capacity, and still set the cobot to Single Pick in pallet pattern situations where two boxes cannot be placed consistently and simultaneously.
All robot palletizing helps reduce manual palletizing, but multipick means more unusual “edge cases” can now be handled by robots along with more standard palletizing tasks.
6 compelling reasons to use multipick
What are the advantages of using multipick?
Here’s what’s most interesting:
- Throughput increase — By selecting and placing multiple cases together, you can dramatically increase throughput.
- Reducing movement time — Excessive robot movement is one of the major wastes of robot management. Multipick helps reduce this to a minimum.
- More flexible fetch — The extra control provided by the multipick makes palletizing robots more flexible.
- Easy setup and configuration — The multi-bay feature is easy to configure in the Robotiq Palletizing Solutions programming interface.
- More suitable applications — Meet current throughput requirements, and set up the capabilities to meet future demands.
- Faster return on investment — By increasing the palletizing throughput, your robot will achieve a faster return on investment than without the multipick.
Multipick is a great addition to the Robotiq Palletizing Solution, helping you take your robot palletizing setup even further.
How one company achieved 75% higher throughput using multi-stake features
Throughput is a key factor in the pet food industry, where the size and efficiency of a batch production can directly impact a company’s ability to remain competitive. To meet increasing demand and ambitious production goals, companies must ensure that they do everything they can to optimize their end-of-line packaging processes.
One user of robots in the pet food industry has a goal of assembling 10 to 13 boxes per minute in their end-of-line process. With a typical robotic palletizing setup this seems impossible once that counts additional slip sheets between pallet layers and pallet changes.
We recommend that they add multipick to their palette generation settings. The feature will allow them to select multiple boxes simultaneously, cutting their cycle times significantly
With multipick, they hit the target and significantly exceeded it. Final cycle time is an impressive 17 to 22 boxes per minute, including stacking between layers and palletizing. This is 30-120% better than their target, which we can estimate to be a conservative 75%.
The multistake feature makes a big difference to the user’s palletizing process. This allows them to meet their production needs and leaves extra room for further capacity in the future.
What palletizing throughput can you achieve?
The 75% increase in that example is impressive, but the most important question is how multipick can benefit your business.
Software features greatly increase palletizing throughput and reduce time spent on each palletizing cycle. This can help you save money, increase customer satisfaction by ensuring products are available when needed, and enable your business to better compete on both price and volume while minimizing operating costs.
So how much can you increase your palletizing throughput by leveraging multiple picks? Try the configurator and find out!
How does multipick benefit your palletizing process? Let us know in the comments below or join the discussion at LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebookor the DoF professional robotics community.
