Robotic Palletizing Installation Adds Production Flexibility

Dan Schodowski faced a challenge. As president and CEO of Solon, Ohio-based JTM Products, Inc., Schodowski knew the company was ready to grow, and making the right investment choices would be critical. Should the company buy an existing facility or build a new one? What new material handling equipment would be needed to support the company’s growth?

Perhaps best known as the remaining piece of the original manufacturer of Murphy Oil Soap, which was sold to the Colgate-Palmolive Company in 1991, JTM was founded in 1890 as the Phoenix Oil Company, producing axle greases, belt dressings and lubricants for the Industrial Revolution. Today, the company is still privately held by grandsons of the founder, Jeremiah Timothy Murphy, whose initials now form the company’s name. JTM’s business centers around two product lines: Murphy’s™ tire mounting and demounting lubricants, and Phoenix™ pipe joint lubricants, used in the construction of water and sewer lines.

The company also does private label and specialty product manufacturing.

For Schodowski, JTM’s steady performance of up to $10 million in annual sales and an estimated 65% market share for its two main product lines gave the company financial stability on which to grow. But in the back of his mind, Schodowski knew that if he were to expand JTM, changes in production techniques would be inevitable for the 114-year old company, its employees and its owners.

“We were pretty much pigeonholed into an old building,” says Schodowski. “We couldn’t expand. Even within the building we could not add a lot of machinery or equipment. If we wanted to expand our business, we needed more room.” Once JTM decided on a new site (its present location just outside of Cleveland) Schodowski’s next challenge was to meet the material handling demands of JTM’s product range. While the Murphy’s line of products is primarily packaged in 25- and 40-pound pails, the Phoenix line is primarily packaged in cases of either quart or gallon containers. With both sets of products needing to be palletized before shipment, Schodowski’s factory staff was left with a lot of slow and heavy lifting.

“When we decided to move, we looked at how we could set up our operations differently,” says Schodowski. “Our layout was fragmented in the old building, and we could not bring in automated palletizers or other automated equipment. We were faced with having to keep adding people to manually load the product on the pallets and truck them somewhere else to have them shrink-wrapped.”

The Move to Automation
“When we started laying out the new facility, we knew that we had a lot more room and that we would be able to run both lines at the same time,” says Schodowski. “Running simultaneously in the old plant was a predicament. To do that, we needed extra staff on hand; staff that would be there even if both lines were not running.” What was needed was a solution that could handle both product lines. This would allow JTM to allocate more space in the new 70,000-square foot facility for its chemical processing and packaging
equipment and its inventory. The answer was an automated palletizer that could palletize both pails and cases.

“Killing two birds with one stone, we thought if we have an automatic palletizer then we don’t need somebody at the end of the line,” says Schodowski. “The idea was not to eliminate any jobs, but we also didn’t want to have to add any personnel when the business started growing.”

“Together with Larry Wilson, JTM’s director of operations, the pair researched their options. The two, both veterans of Colgate-Palmolive—Wilson, in human resources and manufacturing, and Schodowski, in accounting and finance, were convinced that an automated palletizing solution would be the most cost-effective way to go. A short list of vendors was drawn up. It was finally narrowed down to one: FKI Logistex, the only vendor who offered an integrated solution that could handle both pails and cases. That solution, an integrated robotic palletizing cell featuring a Motoman articulated-arm robot with an FKI Logistex vacuum end-effector, would win the sale from JTM.

“It was either buy two separate palletizers to handle the cases and handle the pails, or look at a solution that could do both,” says Schodowski. “When we found out that FKI Logistex offered us the ability to palletize both product lines with one piece of equipment, we wanted to look at that option.” Installing the FKI Logistex robotic palletizer would also free up floor space in the new plant.

Flexibility in Motion
Roughly in the center of JTM’s new factory floor, surrounded on one side by the processing and packaging equipment, and on the other by pallets of stacked cases and pails, sits JTM’s FKI Logistex robotic palletizing cell, enclosed in a safety cage. Pails of Murphy’s tire lubricant paste being filled, capped, and conveyed up to the cell chug along in the background. With a whir of motion, the robot rotates to pick up an empty pallet from its pallet-loading station and places it in position at the start of an out feed pallet conveyor so it can begin palletizing the pails.

In the project’s original design, 10 pallets are pre-loaded onto the pallet-loading station at the start of a sequence and the robot counts its way down. FKI Logistex is currently working on a modification that will allow the palletizer to sense how many pallets have been loaded onto the pallet station. This will allow the operator to load any number of pallets at the start of a run up to 10, providing JTM flexibility to do shorter runs and vary sizes without having to manually pull pallets out of the cell.

On the in feed side of the cell, accumulation conveyors take up the pails from the production conveyors and queue them for the robot on instruction from the robot’s control system. Depending on the product size and stacking pattern used in the particular palletizing operation, the robot’s vacuum tool picks up one or three pails at a time by attaching to their tops, and then puts them down to form the rows and layers of palletized product. When the pallets are full, they are shrink-wrapped by an automatic shrink-wrapper and taken by fork lift to inventory on the shop floor. A similar process occurs for the cases of Phoenix pipe lubricant. The operator sets the system up at the outset, loads the pallets, and lets the robot pick a pallet to begin stacking. The cases come into the cell from a second in feed line, and the process starts anew.

Design flexibility is built into the FKI Logistex system. While JTM does not currently use the robot’s full capacity to run both lines into the palletizing cell simultaneously, the robot gives JTM the ability to ramp up production at any time. Beyond allowing JTM to run two lines at once, the FKI Logistex palletizing cell handles a variety of stacking patterns and pallet sizes in addition to managing the different pail and case sizes. For the 25-pound Murphy’s pails, the robot stacks 40” x 48” pallets with four layers, each containing 12 pails. The 40-pound Murphy’s pails are stacked in two patterns. On 40” x 48” pallets, the pattern is three layers of 12 pails each. On 48” x 48” pallets, the pattern is three layers of 16 pails each.

For the Phoenix cases of quart conta.