De Bortoli has boosted the efficiency of its largest winery, thanks to a new palletiser pattern forming system from Foodmach.
The second largest family-owned grape growing and winemaking business in Australia, De Bortoli Wines was founded in 1928 and employs around 500 people in Australia plus the US, UK, and EU. It produces wines in the NSW Riverina, Yarra Valley, King Valley, Heathcote, and Hunter Valley.
On a visit to the Riverina winery in Bilbul, NSW, Foodmach’s national sales engineer Lachie Hyndman spotted that the palletisers were not keeping up with the cartons coming off the line; this meant that one bottling line’s packs had to be split up between two palletisers, and more than one line could not be in operation at one time.
Bryan Mahlknecht, packaging engineer at De Bortoli who was involved with the project explains, “We were basically hamstrung: we either had to run both lines much slower than we wanted to, or shut one line down completely to run the other at high speed.”
Working with Mahlknecht and the De Bortoli team, Foodmach audited the palletisers’ efficiency, looking at ways to allow the palletiser on Line 1 to handle one bottling line’s entire load. The company designed and supplied new carton conveyors, as well as spiral elevators and a lowerator, and took out the Line 1 palletiser’s existing pattern forming infeed system to replace it with a new Foodmach pattern forming system incorporating a Robomatrix compact head.
“Since the installation, we've upped the efficiency significantly on both lines,” Mahlknecht tells PKN.
The new system quickly forms the packs onto a layer on a static pattern forming belt; when complete, the pattern is driven to the sweep bar and placed into the pallet. The Robowizard pattern forming software lets the operators adjust each layer quickly using a drag-and-drop interface, implementing new patterns without additional resources. This allows De Bortoli to easily change pack sizes and pallet configurations.
“Thanks to the new system, Line 1 can now run at capacity with just one palletiser, the other being used for Line 2,” Mahlknecht says, noting that both lines can run without stopping to wait for palletisers.
According to Mahlknecht, the project, which took 12 months from inception to installation, has given production efficiency at the Riverina winery a much-needed upgrade, delivering the outcome De Bortoli wanted.
