Handing due acknowledgement to the structural engineering skills of the insect world in general, and honeybees in particular, SMI Pacifica is enthusiastically extolling the virtues of a new system to minimise the lost voids that limit pallet capacity.
The company, the local arm of the international SMI Group, says it has devised a system to add up to 50 per cent capacity to pallet stacking by taking advantage of the accuracy of its shrink wrapping lines.
It says that by shrink wrapping products at an alignment of 60 degrees rather than 90 degrees, and taking full advantage of the accuracy of its shrink wrapping lines, SMI has been able to align bottles on pallets in staggered rows, rather than shoulder to shoulder.
The company says this allows packs of interlock or overlap on pallet configurations of 12 containers and other stacking arrangements.
SMI Pacifica's manager Steve Warren says the company followed the example of honeybees to devise the simple shrink-wrapping enhancement.
“Bees figured it out millions of years ago and now SMI is replicating the space efficiency we see in honeycombs,” he says.
“Depending on the diameter of the product unit, pallet utilisation can be increased between seven and 50 per cent, simply by reducing wasted space.
“The extra strength and stability of this arrangement also eliminates the need for interleaving.”
Warren says bottlers in the US and Europe who have already switched to SMI's honeycomb packing report that it is also well received by retailers, who value the reduction in pallet movements and the substitution of waste cartons and layer boards with recyclable shrink film.
Meanwhile, the company says it is also responding to strong price competition in the market for palletising systems by offering significant price cuts on its palletiser equipment.
He says palletisers are joining DVDs and mobile phones on the road to intense price competition, and that by combining simple mechanisms with advance computer control, the company has priced its systems at 30 to 40 per cent lower than robot hybrids or traditional sweep-arm palletisers.
“Now almost anyone packing high-volume goods can afford afford automated pallet loading,” Warren says.
“Our APS palletisers use the same engineering philosophy as our shrink and carton systems, many of which are still going strong after 20 years.”
He says the company's palletisers can handle a wide variety of product including cartons, crates, bundles, shrink packs, trays, bottles and cans.
Product changeovers happen with push-button ease, using programmed parameters.
“Installation is 'out of the box', usually requiring only a day's interruption to the line.”
Either high or low level variants can be specified with capacities of 500 and 300 layers per hour.
