Customer Testimonials – Robotic Palletiser Reviews from UK Manufacturers

My name is Tom Woodrow, I work in a distribution centre based on Teesport. Our core function is to move general merchandise rather than food.

We were looking for an automated palletiser solution as a business because our inbound operation is very manual, and anything we can do to save money in that space means we can essentially pass that saving on to the customer.

We went with the Granta palletiser solution because we required a method of being able to de-stuff a container and potentially save on those productive labour costs. We looked at the Granta website, we watched video testimonials, and we also looked at videos of the palletiser in operation. We thought that it was the right fit for our operational needs.

The key benefit we've seen as a business from using the palletiser system from Granta is that the software makes it really easy for us to programme new case builds. We can upscale those stack files as and when we need to, to get the best cases per pallet and also maintain pallet integrity.

In terms of the benefits we've seen from a productivity perspective, we've seen an increase in the cases per hour that we can de-stuff off the container. We've also seen an impact in terms of the ergonomic benefits of a colleague not having to manually pick up case after case, which could be 16 kilograms. There's a multitude of different reasons why I'd recommend Granta as a palletiser solution, one of which would be that the CapEx payback time is favourable given the savings that the palletiser can produce for us.

Secondly, I would say a big draw for us was the ability to scale up the number of stack options that we had for the machine. If we get a new product in on a new line, it takes a couple of minutes to get that information configured on the system, and then we're very quickly off de-stuffing that particular new product – and it's set and forget, we don't need to do that again.

I'd say finally, and most important to us as a depot, is the ongoing relationship that we have with Granta. The customer service is industry leading. It's refreshing to have that commitment from a company – to see them being as passionate about their product as we are about delivering a great service for the business.

My name is Arman Ansari. I'm the Operations Support Manager at Primula. My role is around bringing in innovative machinery and technology, looking at automation and increasing capacity on-site.

Primula is part of the Kavli Group, which is owned by the Kavli Trust, so all the profits we create go to good causes. As a whole, you'll know us for our spreadable cheese – specifically our spreadable cheese in the tube.

We had a shift in the business and we wanted to invest in our facility, specifically our production area, and we started coming up with a ten-year plan. One of the items on the agenda was palletising. Currently we have a lot of manual handling, which has come about because of our palletising methodology, so we were looking into automating that.

When we started looking into palletising, I think I contacted around seven or eight companies. One of the companies that we contacted was Yaskawa. We have a Yaskawa robot on our production floor which has now been working for fourteen years, and it's really made us think of Yaskawa very highly. When we contacted them, they let us know that for palletising they normally go to Granta. So we contacted Granta from that referral and we took it from there.

From the start it was fantastic. We had a lot of conversations with Derek, the salesperson, and he was brilliant. He really wanted to get us the right solution. We did quite a lot of different configurations to try and find the right kind of design. One of the issues we have is space, which helped in terms of identifying the cobot as being the one to go for.

Once we had a finalised design, we spoke with Derek about the install. Their team came to site, we got the system in place and up and running within three to four days, and then we started the commissioning phase.

Once we had the palletiser up and running, we saw loads of benefits in terms of manual handling. It's probably one of the heaviest products that we palletise, so taking that manual handling aspect away gave us a lot in terms of health and safety.

In terms of personnel, we were able to redeploy the production team, which allowed them to spend more time across lines instead of just focusing on individual lines. The palletiser from Granta is actually very flexible – you can create your own pallet configurations and put new recipes in yourself, which was something that other manufacturers weren't able to give us. For example, if we wanted a new product to be put in, we would have had to have their engineer come to site. So there's great flexibility there.

I'd recommend Granta's cobot because it accomplished what we were looking for in terms of our primary objective of removing manual handling from that line, in a way that was new and innovative in terms of a collaborative robot. We didn't have that proposal given to us by any other supplier. From another point of view, I'd say that the team spent a lot of time with us on the design – they were very proactive and they really wanted to get the right design and final solution for us.

And lastly, I'd say that support-wise, they've been fantastic with us.

I'm Tim Rowe, I'm Cluster Engineering and Facilities Manager for FSi Promat. We make fire stopping equipment – sealants, silicones and also batts.

One of our production lines produces 12 million cartridges a year, and the palletisation was manual. So it was a heavy manual process – manual handling, lots of issues with repetitive strain injuries for our employees – and we were looking at trying to reduce that by going to an automated palletising system. I chose the cobot palletiser from Granta because it has a very small footprint and a very high weight load for its size, which is something we struggle with here – we don't have a very large footprint.

The installation by Granta was unbelievably smooth and very, very quick. They came with it all palletised, ready to go, and it was installed quickly. We had some communication issues on the control side, with the other parts of the production line, which they managed to resolve. They dealt with training brilliantly. And a key thing for me as project manager for this was the support post-installation, which was absolutely brilliant. We did have a few little niggles with the system in terms of how we had it running, and they came and helped, whether it was mechanical or electrical. They made sure that when they left site, the system was ready to go.

We're getting quite a lot of benefits from the system, in areas that we weren't really expecting either. Obviously we have a labour saving in terms of the labour demand on the production line. The system is very easy to use – programming is unbelievably simple, and another reason I chose the system is that it's so straightforward. But even on the quality aspect – I can guarantee now that every pallet is the same when it leaves this factory, whereas before it was down to individuals.

I'd recommend the cobot system for the fact that it has a very small footprint, a very high kilogram weight load, unbelievably efficient safety systems, and it is a good, cost-effective solution.

I'm Steve Hellam and I'm the Group Projects Manager for G&J Distillers. G&J Distillers are part of the international spirits company Quintessential Brands, and at 260 years old we are one of the oldest distilleries in the world. We started looking for an automated palletising solution for our small semi-automated line, Line 3. On Line 3 the palletisation was done by people – typically around ten cases per minute, six-pack cases – and that had a high risk of repetitive strain and manual handling injury. That's why we started looking for a new palletising solution.

The solution offered by Granta Automation hit the mark, both from a price point of view and return on investment, and equally it gave us the operational parameters we wanted to achieve – a variety of stacking patterns and ease of choice of stacking patterns – and the automated stacking pattern software gave us all of that.

Key benefits of the system: one, it's modular, so from the time it arrived and was uncrated to the time it was picking its first case and stacking it on a pallet was less than 48 hours – the line break was very minimal. The second benefit, of course, is the operational capability – the operators actually love the machine, it's really easy to use. And last but not least, we have seen a performance increase because it's an automatic palletiser.

I would recommend the Granta palletisation system because of its entry-level costing, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It does a great job of putting our containers onto a pallet, and it does it consistently and well. The other key reason for doing business with Granta is that they're very easy to do business with. They're open to challenge, they're open to redesign, what they do is very innovative, and they're very, very helpful.

My name is Simon Gladwell. I'm the current Managing Director of HG Gladwell & Sons Ltd. We're based in Copdock near Ipswich in Suffolk, and we are manufacturers and distributors of animal and pet foods. We currently manufacture wild bird food, cage bird food and poultry feed, and distribute this throughout East Anglia and slightly further afield. We've had a robot palletiser here since 2005, so we knew what we wanted – we just had to find a provider that could offer us the new solution to our current packing requirements.

We decided to purchase the robot palletising unit from Granta because we found them very approachable and extremely easy to deal with, and following a factory visit – where we'd already shipped a pallet of our goods to them to trial stack for us – it gave me the confidence that they were actually going to deliver what they had put on a piece of paper.

The installation was remarkably quick compared to some quotes we got, which were a minimum of two weeks' installation time with multiple engineers on-site. The Granta guys had it installed by the end of the first day, programming was done on days two and three, and by day four we were actually packing bags and stacking them on pallets.

The big benefit of this robot installation is that hopefully it's going to give me another fifteen years of happy robot stacking. We've got multiple stack patterns that it can use, as well as handling slip sheets, which are placed on the bottom of the pallet on which the bags are then stacked. Our previous robot couldn't do any of that.

I'd happily recommend Granta's palletisers to other businesses because of their responsiveness to any questions we had – and we had some questions following the install. Their engineers were superb: they came and sorted out any problems we had, and they trained our staff really well in how to use it and all the features that we asked for. And I also like the proximity – it's nice dealing with another local company.

I'm Trevor Shaw, Operations Director at Community Foods. Community Foods is a company that packs dried fruit, nuts and seeds. We portion them out into small retail packs and also for the ingredients market. We were looking to buy a new palletiser system predominantly to combat manual handling on-site, HSE requirements, and equally efficiencies on lines.

The Granta cobot palletiser really piqued my interest. It had everything that we were looking for, and they also gave us a competitive financial package. The installation of the cobot machine went extremely well.

The most important part is that Granta offered us a service that allowed our team to go to their site to understand the machine's capabilities and how we would use the machine, and to do full training set-up at their site. When we had the installation in Witham, they also came to site for three days. They helped my engineering team and my production team set up and fully automate the machine, and then also stayed for a further day to watch us operate the machine.

The palletiser gave me two key benefits. The first being manual handling – we've managed to eliminate the risk of manual handling, and the robot works very efficiently, even at weekends. The second part of that is our line efficiency. Due to that, we can reduce the number of people we need on the line, and it helps us keep costs down. Also, from a financial perspective, we'll be able to pay back this machine a lot quicker than we anticipated – we believe just over one year.

I would highly recommend Granta to anyone who finds themselves with small space constraints within their business, or issues with manual handling. Granta is an exceptional team. They have a great sales team. They also have a far superior engineering team – their support was a step-by-step guide and it gave us a beautiful installation.

I'm Sean Quinn, I look after sales for the UK. Lallemand is a yeast and bacteria business with over 29 manufacturing sites throughout the world. The reason we were looking for a new palletising system for our business is that we wanted to modernise the current method of packing our pallets to a much more efficient and effective palletising system.

The reason we chose the Granta palletising system was that they were able to accommodate a split installation, which accommodates our 24/7 operation. This allowed us to do it in two stages and keep production at 100%.

The benefits that we've achieved from using the Granta palletising system are that we are able to achieve perfect configuration in our palletising, and we're also able to get the pallet temperatures down within the required period.

We would recommend Granta to other businesses because they were able to look at our needs, adapt, and work with us to come up with a workable solution in a very difficult production environment.

I'm Lee Clack, I'm the Site Quality Manager here at Cartonage Limited and KOJ Packaging. We produce millions and millions of sleeves for the food and the non-contact food industry throughout the UK and Ireland.

We wanted to automate the pallet stacking process to make it more streamlined and increase productivity, so the purchase of the robot and the automated palletising system ticked all the boxes for us. We purchased from Granta because of the innovation they displayed, along with the promise of a quick turnaround in terms of the install being up and running. It ticked all the boxes we were looking for in terms of the quality of the product, being UK-based, along with the finance package that we were offered.

We've seen huge benefits from installing the palletiser. We've taken the whole of the manual handling out of our production process. We've seen productivity increase, and just the whole general quality of the product. It runs superbly and it can clearly cope with all three production lines, no matter what speed we fire the boxes down at the robot. We found the robot software very user-friendly – we've not had any issues at all.

Granta did a training programme for several people here, and we haven't had to have any additional training to use the robot. We'd recommend Granta based on the key benefits that we've seen since the install. The install was very quick and very professional. Two of the key benefits that we have seen are increased productivity, and that we've been able to take the manual handling operation out of our production process.

My name is Jason Tallant and I'm an Electrical Engineer at Bostik Stafford. Bostik is a global leader in the manufacturing of sealing, bonding and adhesive technology.

The main reason Bostik went out to look for an automated palletiser was to improve machine efficiency and reduce manual handling and fatigue on the shop floor. We chose the cobot palletiser from Granta because it's modular, it's expandable, and it's easy to integrate with existing lines. The installation went really well and the team worked great with the site personnel. With any site challenges, Granta have responded with speed and precision.

The main benefits of the cobot are that it's easy to program, plus it reduces manual handling and improves machine efficiency.

We would certainly recommend Granta because the service response has been quick and the team are extremely knowledgeable. The cobot has delivered exactly what we wanted. It's been a simple way to automate our palletising. The palletiser has been economically viable, and the whole process was quick from quotation to delivery.