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Robotic palletizer doubles output for BASF

Sparks, GA facility replaces semi-automated palletizing process with a robotic palletizing cell that increases the case-per-minute speed of 6 to 8/min up to 15/min.

The palletizing solution uses a four-axis robot from Fanuc. At presstime, the line was idle, as it was BASF’s slow season.
The palletizing solution uses a four-axis robot from Fanuc. At presstime, the line was idle, as it was BASF’s slow season.

Based in Germany, BASF SE is the largest chemical producer in the world. The BASF Group comprises subsidiaries and joint ventures in more than 80 countries and operates six integrated production sites and 390 other production sites in Europe, Asia, Australia, the Americas, and Africa. At its location in Sparks, GA, BASF produces granular and liquid fungicides and insecticides used in the agricultural industry.

In 2018, with demand for its products forecast to grow, the Sparks facility began looking into ways to automate its case palletizing operations for its liquid packaging area to meet that demand. As Scott Freeman, TES (Technical Engineering Services) Manager explains, the plant’s existing palletizing system was semi-automated: “There was some automation in key areas, but it was kind of antiquated, so there were a lot of manual steps in the process.

“Another big driver for automation was reliability. And, just in general, we looked at it for improvements in EH&S [environment, health, and safety], but it was really the increase in future forecast volumes that drove the change.”

With access to a range of BASF packaging plants as well as to co-packers that handle packaging overflow for the company, Freeman was able to benchmark different palletizing systems to determine the best solution for his operations. “Brenton [a product brand of ProMach] was a name that popped up as being reliable and easy to work with, and providing a good-quality product,” he says. “That’s really where we started when we began talking to equipment suppliers. A lot of it had to do with word of mouth and experience with utilizing Brenton as far as building a degree of certainty that we were going to get a good product in the end.”

BASF went to Brenton looking for a system that could handle a variety of pallet configurations and case sizes at speeds to 15 cases/min. Ease of operation was also an important factor, although not at the top of its list initially. “It was less of a driver than other aspects, but we certainly noted that we’d eventually have to have on-site resources to be able to program the system,” Freeman says. “Early on we took the position that the vendor would do a lot of the initial programming work, as we may not have a ton of changes in a year, and that would get us started.”

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