Automated palletizing pays for itself

The massive labor shortage seemingly has no end in sight, especially when it comes to labor-intensive industries. By some calculations, the warehousing industry alone needs to fill nearly half a million jobs. Those who traditionally worked these positions are retiring or quitting in droves, and younger generations don’t gravitate to work that is often dull, dirty or dangerous.

Drilling down, one of the most labor-intensive jobs in the warehouse or manufacturing floor remains palletizing. For this reason, it’s one of the best areas to target your automation dollars, says Joe Campbell, senior manager of strategic marketing and application development at Universal Robots.

“Palletizing has been low-hanging fruit for years,” he says. “If you have openings for these jobs, you’re probably not filling them.”

This reluctance to take on the palletizing task by humans has resulted in a boon for their robot counterparts. While not a new technology or concept, semi- and fully-automated palletizing is now enjoying popularity and high adoption. It’s also evolving into more sophisticated equipment capable of managing end-to-end palletizing and depalletizing operations.

“The desire to work in manual labor jobs is at an all-time low,” says Witron’s Norman Leonhardt, director of business development. “At Modex recently, everything was about automation this year. In the past, that wasn’t always the case.”

Additionally, where employees used to resist automation and robots, they now welcome them into collaborative roles. “Interest is at an all-time high,” says Josh Cloer, director of sales at Mujin. “The situation has evolved into a matter of: ‘Can you do this work without automation?’”

All of which makes the return on investment (ROI) not much of a question, and a faster process, as well. There’s never been a better time to justify automated palletizing equipment.

Overcoming challenges

While plenty of progress has been made on the capability side of palletizing and de-palletizing equipment, the biggest challenge for fitting it into your processes remains the fact that it’s best suited for high-volume, low-mix operations.

“It’s tougher if you have a high-mix, low-volume combination,” Campbell explains. “And production runs can vary widely based on demand from the market, which adds another layer of complexity.”

Today’s e-commerce heavy operations do not fit the low-mix side of the profile, which has led to innovation and improvement in this regard.

Cloer says that single-SKU pallets are an easy, tried-and-true application for automated palletizing. But building orders with a variety of SKUs does remain the more complicated solution.

“You need an automated upstream system that can buffer and sequence cases,” Cloer says. “There’s a lot that goes into the process. We’ve been using software and 3D vision to ask for the appropriate sequence from upstream automation. Then the robots can buffer and re-sequence to build multi-SKU pallets.”

Palletizing equipment is starting to become more flexible and is keeping up with the evolving state of the industry. “We’re seeing more flexible solutions that can manage in these varied environments,” says Campbell.

Depalletizing equipment is driven again by the uptick in e-commerce and the shortage of available labor.

Collaborative palletizing by “cobots” is one example, and Campbell says it’s an area experiencing explosive growth. “You can set up palletizing cells that are very flexible and can be redeployed from line to line, depending on your production mix,” he explains. “They are easy to set up and behave more like a tool you deploy when you have a problem.”

Leonhardt agrees that flexibility is key today. “We keep it simple,” he says. “We have a robotic arm that pushes pallets to a pre-defined spot. The palletizer can handle any size case, bag or box.”

If you envision a LEGO set, you get an idea of how Witron’s products offer up flexibility, says Leonhardt. “Every case is different and there’s lots of sorting ahead of time,” he says. “It’s very precise, automated work so that the cases arrive at the pallet at the right time and order for assembly.”

Customer types for whom these solutions are a good fit include retailers, food and beverage makers, grocery and consumer goods manufacturers.

The role of technology

Software integration—and increasingly artificial intelligence and machine learning—is playing a bigger role in automated palletization. Universal Robots, for instance, recently partnered with RightHand Robotics to power a three-robot system that offers an item-handling solution that works with various materials handling solutions like automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS). The hardware platform and the AI together offer easy configuration of sources and destinations and workflows. Performance can top more than 1,200 units per hour at a reliability rate of more than 99.5%.

There are also cobots designed for heavier payloads. Universal Robots has built-in palletizing programming that works along with a conveyor and a gripper. The gripper works as part of a plug-and-play set up that the company bills as a full ecosystem enabling smoother palletizing and automation.

Witron also offers end-to-end solutions. “The palletizers are integrated into the entire warehouse management system (WMS) and connected through the entire distribution center,” says Leonhardt.

This might look like sequencing in storage to make sure products arrive at the palletizer at the right time and order. “The WMS manages redundancy, forecasting information, velocity of movement and more,” says Leonhardt. “The palletizer is the end of the assembly line.”

Witron can also track what a pallet looks like—its condition, how stable it is, whether the stretch wrap is doing its job or might need adjusting. Additionally, because Witron works closely with the grocery industry, it also tracks every product in its system back to the purchase order, expiration dates, whether its fresh or frozen. This ensures the products meet the palletizer in the right condition for shipping.

Depalletizing and ROIs

While palletizing is making strides, it’s the older sibling to depalletizing, which is now coming on strong in manufacturing and warehousing. Honeywell Intelligrated, which has been in the palletizing space for 20 years, has been evolving the equipment over time.

“It started with fixed, static inline palletizers,” Thomas Evans, robotics chief technology officer, says, “that worked with single, layered products. Since then, we’ve made the systems more intelligent with AI or machine learning algorithms that give the robots the intelligence to individually pick and place items.”

It all comes down to customer demands and needs, Evans adds. “We’re creating technology and an evolving product line to increase flexibility and adapt to what we’re seeing in the market.”

A big piece of that now is depalletizing equipment, driven again by the uptick in e-commerce and the shortage of available labor. “If we present a smart, flexible depalletizer that can handle variations, it can make an immense difference in productivity,” Evans says. “It adds stability to your shift. The robot ‘worker’ is reliable, and you can count on it working within a very specific plus or minus of your desired rate.”

Roughly, says Evans, a depalletizer might be able to manage between 500 and 800 packages an hour. Handled manually and that number drops to between 300 and 600. “If you’re consistently running at that higher output, it’s just a couple of years to develop an ROI,” he explains. “That’s appealing to customers.”

Universal also has a collaborative depalletizer project with Mujin. “We have a mixed unit-load depalletizer,” says Campbell. “It can manage a dozen different products from various manufacturers, stacked randomly, even at odd angles, and still identify where to depalletize into the right boxes.”

If you’re going to use a depalletizer in a fully automated environment, that might include a conveyor that runs the pallets to the robot, or even an autonomous vehicle to do the same. Additionally, 2D and 3D cameras plus custom software can tell the robot where to go to collect the package safely and intact.

On the whole, the rate of ROI for palletizing and depalletizing will have a wide range. “A single SKU operation is easily justified,” says Cloer. “With a mixed SKU operation, the robot piece of the puzzle requires a big investment, but there’s still a lot of return.”

Traditionally, a two-year payback on a palletizer investment was typical and considered warranted. “That number is shifting and getting faster due to the labor shortage,” Cloer says. “Automation provides resiliency in your supply chain, and that’s a worthwhile payback.”

Leonhardt explains that proving ROI is a different calculation than in the past. “It’s going to vary depending on your circumstances and location,” he says. “But they can return investment in unexpected ways.”

Building denser pallets, for instance, can help save transportation costs. Stable pallets that don’t fall over is another small gain. Building pallets that allow for orderly unloading at retailers increases accuracy and speed, as does the reduction in mis-picks when machines take the place of humans.

From Campbell’s perspective, collaborative palletizers are the way of the future. “They are going into environments that traditional robots couldn’t,” he says. “We’re breaking new ground with these collaborative efforts, entering markets that couldn’t consider this type of automation in the past.”