FDBusiness.com

Manna Foods is a producer of savoury sauces and employs 70 people. It is a family owned business, and although relatively small, they are extremely successful in what they do with a no-nonsense approach to business. Manna Foods choose carefully which products in the market most suit their production methods to ensure what they produce, is produced in the most efficient way. However this business philosophy requires flexibility, particularly at the end of the packing line.

Manna Foods chose CSi’s i-Pal for their end of line palletising and achieved a 9 month payback! This helped them to stay ahead of their competitors, and due to the good experience they had with their first palletiser, they decided to buy a second one for one of their other lines.

The i-Pal, although a sophisticated robot palletising system, is a low cost solution with the following significant benefits:

1. A flexible multi-use unit which fits into many environments. Almost 150 i-Pals have been installed already in a wide variety of businesses. Having achieved significant sales volume of the i-Pal CSi are constantly lowering their prices.
2. The i-Pal is easy to install and commission allowing the benefits of automatic palletising to be achieved within a very short time period.
3. The i-Pal is assembled and tested in Romania, and is installed and commissioned by Romanian CSi specialists making it possible to keep the i-Pal as low cost as possible whilst maintaining CSi’s extremely high quality standards.

One of the challenges CSi faced on this project is that Manna Foods have a large range of pallets. The i-Pal is flexible enough to overcome these challenges. Empty and full pallets are transported to and from the i-Pal with a forklift truck. Manna Foods has up to 12 different pallet patterns which was no problem for the i-Pal as some additional software programming solved this. Manna Foods are also able to adjust pallet patterns themselves.

Due to the short payback period predicted, Manna Foods decided to purchase the i-Pal.  However the i-Pal is also available for lease, or even on short-term rent. This spreads the investment load and enables the financial benefit of automatic palletising to be realised almost immediately. Manna Foods have a skilled and pragmatic maintenance department who after a short period of training were operating and supporting the i-Pal without any interruptions or stoppages. Manna Foods decided not to purchase any spare parts as they were so confident in the technology they had purchased.

Benefits

• High stacks (2.5 m); not possible by hand
• Pay-back time was shorter than 9 months
• Unwrapped pallets in container because of high stacking accuracy and stable stacks.

It is important not to forget the operators who play a vital role in the success of any automated project. Once trained, the operators quickly gained the confidence to put the i-Pal robot cell into full production. The simplicity of the i-Pal machine and its intuitive operator panel makes the job a lot easier.

For more information contact CSi industries BV – Raamsdonksveer, the Netherlands – www.CSiportal.com, E-mail: info@CSiportal.com, Tel +31 (0)162 575 000.