After three decades of supplying American manufacturers with advanced packaging automation solutions, Aagard recently embarked on its most groundbreaking project yet: a fully-automated plant that runs 24/7 with no human operators needed – also known as a lights-out production setup.
Fully automating a production plant means automating the handling and packaging of material as well as automating the material transport around the plant. When long-time Aagard collaborator, Hartfiel Automation, learned about Aagard’s need for automating material movement, Hartfiel didn’t hesitate suggesting its AMR solutions partner, ROEQ.
Aagard chose the ROEQ TLR1190 (Lift ‘n’ Roll) and ROEQ TR600 AMR solutions for this extraordinary project. How did Aagard end up choosing these solutions? What intralogistics challenges did Aagard face in this project? How well do the solutions integrate in Aagard’s automated plant setup?
Competitive advantage through plant automation
Let’s briefly turn back the clock to the inception of this project. Director of Engineering & R&D at Aagard, Travis Kloehn, recounts: “Our customer came to us with an amazing task. Imagine a place where a product comes in and out of a plant – going through all of the secondary packaging equipment – without an operator even handling the product. The customer really changed the vision of what plant automation looks like. So in this project, we’ve automated material handling, material prep, case blank loading, sleeve blank loading, and many other operations”.
In an economy with increasing competitive pressures to lower costs and increase output, customer requests such as this are becoming increasingly common. Oftentimes, however, companies looking to reduce costs via plant automation focus only on material handling automation while missing the low-hanging fruit of automating material logistics. Manual material logistics often means tying skilled labor down for multiple hours a day, just toiling material back and forth. With a decade of experience in developing AMR solutions that reduce repetitive manual labor, ROEQ had exactly the kind of solutions Aagard’s customer needed.
Minimizing costs and cycle time by choosing the right ROEQ solutions for the job
In this project, the material was a mixed array of case blanks, sleeve blanks, and pallets, which was to be moved between conveyor stations – at first glance, a relatively simple application with ROEQ’s conveyor top module, ROEQ TR600. There was one drawback, though: the costliness of having too many motorized conveyors on the plant floor.
One option was to remove some of the conveyors and instead have the pallets on P&D stands (also known as pallet racks/stands). Here, a ROEQ Pallet Lift module could pick up and drop off pallets. However, that would then cut off the Pallet Lift module from interacting with the conveyors.
To make it work with P&D stands, Aagard could have installed motorized split conveyors in front of the standard conveyors. This would allow interaction between the ROEQ Pallet Lift module and the conveyor, but it would also add extra costs to the project and take up too much of the customer’s floor space. However, ROEQ had a trick up its sleeve, and Aagard would be the first to see this trick.
During the early stages of this project, ROEQ had almost finished developing the award-winning ROEQ TLR1190 EU. Also known as the Lift ‘n’ Roll, the TLR1190 EU is a combined lifter-and-conveyor module, built for exactly what Aagard’s customer was needing: interacting directly with both conveyors and P&D stands using one solution. Apart from being able to both lift and roll cargo, the Lift ‘n’ Roll has a payload of 1190 kg / 2623 lbs and comes in both a EU version, for EU pallets, and a flat-bottomed version for US pallets and other flat-bottomed goods.
The ROEQ TLR1190 EU (Lift ‘n’ Roll) interacting directly with a conveyor instead of a split conveyor
Travis Kloehn and the Aagard team could see the value of the Lift ‘n’ Roll right away: “Using the ROEQ Lift ‘n’ Roll allowed us to reduce the cost associated with any roller conveyors. In our application, we needed to have a roller top module for case blanks, but when you’re handling pallets, we can now drop them off without having the additional cost of motors or additional time transferring the product” says Travis.
For this project, Aagard therefore chose both a MiR600 AMR with the ROEQ Lift ‘n’ Roll and a MiR600 AMR with the ROEQ TR600 conveyor – two solutions that work perfectly in tandem.
"Things come in and out of the system without any humans touching it"
With Aagard’s own automated packaging solutions and the ROEQ/MiR AMR solutions, the workflow was now ready.
Firstly, the production system receives inputs from an automated warehouse system (AWS) – inputs such as case blanks, sleeve blanks, pallets, glue, etc. These products then go through the material prepper unit that presents, eliminates scrap, and stacks off additional pallets. Afterwards, sleeve blanks go into one entry, while case blanks go into another entry point. All of those products then go through the secondary packaging systems and end up going out the palletizing area. Ultimately, that feeds back into the AWS, where the inventory is managed through RFID tags on the pallets themselves.
The transport between each of these production and packaging processes is taken care of by the AMR solutions provided by ROEQ and MiR – efficiently, precisely, reliably.
The ROEQ TR600 collecting sleeve blanks. The ROEQ GuardCom system ensures safe cargo transfer
The ROEQ TLR1190 EU (Lift ‘n’ Roll) collecting a pallet from a P&D stand
The ROEQ TLR1190 EU (Lift ‘n’ Roll) collecting a stack of pallets from a stationary conveyor
The result: "At those rates, the machines need to be fully autonomous, because it's hard to keep up for humans"
What, then, are the bottom line results of Aagard’s lights-out production setup?
“This system can handle 10–15,000 trays per hour – almost a quarter million trays per day – and create cube rates at about a minute and a half. At those rates, the machines almost need to be fully autonomous because it’s hard to keep up for humans” says Travis Kloehn. Couple these figures with the fact that Aagard’s customer will be able to remotely manage the production and diagnose issues, and you start to grasp the many possibilities a system like this offers to busy production companies.
ROEQ and MiR's succes = Aagard's succes
An important aspect that facilitates advanced production logistics is the software side of things. With the MiR fleet manager, MiR Fleet, Aagard’s customer always knows the whereabouts of the AMRs, what tasks the AMRs are performing, and an array of other performance metrics. Additionally, the ROEQ setup software, ROEQ Assist, makes sure that the ROEQ top modules and MiR AMRs work as an integrated solution from day one.
Both MiR Fleet and ROEQ Assist are tools built to make life easier for the plants using the MiR-ROEQ solutions. Just as an AMR solution has to save manual operators’ time, so do these tools need to minimize the time needed to set up and manage the AMRs at customer sites. And it is this shared devotion to customer-centric products that has been one of the cornerstones of the decade-long MiR-ROEQ partnership that Travis Kloehn emphasizes:
“The reason why we chose ROEQ and MiR is because of their close partnership. Ultimately, we knew that if they were both partnered so close and they were both succesful, then we’d be succesful as well – and we have been very succesful”.
