Robotic palletizer improves company's bottom line
A cement company installs a robotic palletizing cell to reduce maintenance and increase efficiency.
St. Lawrence Cement, Catskill, N.Y., a company of the Holcim Group, produces approximately 600,000 metric tons of cement per year. The cement is produced from limestone mined at the plant's quarry, and the majority of it is shipped in bulk to customers by truck or barge. But about 50,000 metric tons is sent to an onsite storage silo before being packaged in valve bags, palletized, and shipped to customers by truck. The company was experiencing problems with the palletizer it was using to palletize the cement-filled bags. "We were using a palletizer that we'd removed from an idle plant," says a project manager at St. Lawrence Cement. "When we installed it, we had hopes that we could get it to produce at the levels we needed. But since the machine hadnt been used for about twenty years, we didnt have much luck."