Who Are Harringtons And What Product Do They Sell?
Harringtons Pet Food is a family operated business that manufactures a range of cat, dog and small animal food. They sell adult, puppy and senior dog wet and dry dog foods in sizes ranging from 150g to 15kg, including grain free and hypoallergenic options. They also produce dry and wet food for adult and senior cats in sizes ranging from 32g to 2kg and rabbit and guinea pig food in 2 and 10 kg sizes.
What Kind Of Solution Did Harringtons Call For?
Harringtons approached Webster Griffin to design and install a high-speed packing line. It would need to fill 650 to 900 big bags hourly (24 hours a day) all fully automatic — from the bag filling to the dispatching stage. It would also need to be able to work with different bag weights and package sizes, including their 10, 12, 15, 17 and 20 kg pet food bags.
After packaging, Harringtons needed their products palletised into neat, square and compact pallets for storage in their clients’ automated high bay warehouses. As they sold their products in the UK and Europe, the pallets would need to be stacked and wrapped
onto mini supermarket shelf retail pallets and standard UK and European shipping pallets. Webster Griffin recommended the installation of a versatile Modulo Bagging machine, Okura palletiser with OXPA self teaching software and Uniwrap pallet wrapping machine. The palletiser and pallet wrapping machine would collate, wrap, and label the pallet and bags and roller conveyors would transport the pallets through the warehouse to an automatic truck loading dock. An automatic pallet collating machine would then combine two mini retail pallets and load them onto a standard distribution pallet to make it suitable for delivery to supermarket chains.
Why Was A High Speed Packing Line An Appropriate Solution For Harringtons?
The bagging system installed by Webster Griffin provided time savings by integrating functions such as an automated film loading system to eliminate downtime during film reel changes. The automatic loaded pallet collating machine came with built-in palletising programmes that could be modified to the client’s satisfaction. It automatically switches between pallet sizes to accommodate mini retail, Dusseldorf, Euro, or red or blue UK standard shipping pallets.
The pallet wrapping machine waterproofed each pallet in preparation for transportation through a national logistics network.
A high speed pallet conveying system accepted the loaded pallets from various automatic packing lines, transporting them to the dispatch zone using an automatic truck loading system. From here the pallets moved to IPN’s new distribution centre and warehouse.
Did The Commissioning Deliver Any Long Lasting Benefits For The Customer?
Upon the client's approval, the bagging and palletising system was commissioned and installed by Webster Griffin’s site engineers. It immediately provided them with their desired benefit of an increased throughput of between 650-900 bags of 17 kg each, every hour. By automating the packing lines and warehouse duties it freed up their employees for other tasks within the business and reduced manual labour. The system was so successful that the client went on to order two more palletising lines.
To Find Out More
The Modulo Bagger