Popina Food Services recently upgraded its snack bar line, increasing production rates and automation levels using integrated robotics from Visy Automation.
Popina Food Services has been an innovative Australian family-owned manufacturer of muesli and snack bars for over 26 years. With a constant stream of new products coming on line, such as the new Goodness Superfoods range of cereals based on the CSIRO-developed BarleyMAX, Popina is on track to grow at over 30% this year.
This rapid growth, though, has put enormous strain on Popina’s manufacturing lines and production costs, and in turn has provided the impetus for Popina to upgrade its lines with the aim to invest in systems that can increase productivity while decreasing production costs. The bar line upgrade project involved improvements across the line with the aim of increasing average production rates by 40% while simultaneously reducing the labour costs by 70%.
One of the main bottle necks in the line was the collation and loading of the muesli bars into the infeed buckets of the cartoning machine. With the line rate increasing to over 250 bars per minute this process desperately required robotic automation as the manual alternative would have required five full-time employees across two-three shifts. As Popina was unable to source an off-the-shelf system for the application, it approached Visy Automation to develop a customised robotic solution. Popina has had a long successful relationship with the Visy Group. This history, coupled with Visy’s proven expertise in packaging and packaging automation, produced a powerful combination that would reduce the risks associated with the project.
Visy and Popina spent considerable time analysing the current and future requirements for the bar line. Visy Automation’s engineers then designed a concept of the solution that was ultimately approved by the Popina management team. The successful design is based around a race-track collation system which is capable of collating bars in three layers to form four, six and nine-bar configurations.
The race track was custom designed and built by Visy Automation and then integrated with an ABB IRB140 robot. The system tracks the speed of the race-track and the continuous motion cartoner and then uses the robot to transfer the bars between the two when the race-track buckets are synchronised with the cartoner. This task is completed seamlessly and never interrupts the continuous motion of the cartoner.
Evaluation showed that the use of robot automation would reduce the time required and the financial cost of developing such a high-speed customised system while simultaneously delivering very long term reliability and ease of set-up and modification. The use of robotics also provided a level of flexibility that cannot be achieved using traditional fixed automation designs. The final system is fully automatic and requires just two quick-release adjustments and a selection on the HMI to modify the pack configuration. The Visy system is designed to operate 24/7 with an efficiency of 98%. This is largely due to the repeatability and reliability provided by the robotics Visy selected.
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