Cerebos has a stable of traditional brands. These are under fire right now on all sides: gourmet brands, health brands, ready meals, home brands...
Cerebos has joined the battle for market share in a world of 'busy working mums', everyone on the go and supermarkets as competitors. Step one by Cerebos general manager for the ANZ supply chain, Joseph Dalo, is a significant upgrade to its 1971-built Sydney factory. Step two is an invitation to Chep to join his innovation challenge.
Dalo tells the story like this:
“Part of our relationship is to talk about continuous improvement. I asked ‘What can we do next?’ So the Chep team came in and did an audit. I gave the guys a fairly free range and said, ‘What are the opportunities for us?’
“One clear opportunity to improve throughput was to upgrade the existing stretch wrap machine, which wasn’t meeting existing requirements.
“It was like Pitt Street, with everyone lining up for the wrapper. The new Lantech SLA4000 is the highest speed wrapper on the market, with a capacity of 120 pallets per hour.
“It integrates seamlessly into the Cerebos operations, and will ultimately facilitate 17 lines feeding into the single wrapper without skipping a beat. And Chep’s integrated solution required no capital outlay by us.
“Pallets will come down the line and go straight through the wrapper. It had to be quick enough to make sure it could keep pulling the pallets through. We have a stretch wrapper now that can handle our capacity. As soon as the pallets are manufactured they’re wrapped, put away and the job is done.”
The new arrangement will also mean fewer forklift movements on the factory floor, which in turn means a safer workplace.
Another benefit of the new wrapper is that it’s ‘smart’. It integrates with Cerebos’ existing warehouse management software, automatically generates labels and applies them to the exterior of the wrapped pallet load. The result is an increase in inventory accuracy, a reduction in damage and a reduction in ‘miss-picks’ through mis-labelling.
The new wrapper is also more energy efficient than its predecessors, which translates into savings on energy costs, and from an environmental point of view, less wrap means fewer carbon emissions.
