Sanofi, one of the world's leading healthcare companies with more than 100,000 employees worldwide, has successfully installed seven UR10 collaborative cobots at its Tours site in France. The integration into packaging lines was made to meet new productivity requirements, that optimized the organization and reduced load carrying and operator movements in palletizing boxes with tablets and capsules. Thanks to the installation of the UR cobots, Sanofi has been able to increase its production and reduce the MSDs (musculoskeletal disorders) of its operators who can now focus on higher value-added tasks.
The Sanofi’s site located in Tours, which employs 300 people, has launched a performance improvement project. The company was looking to optimize the organization of its packaging lines and move from a team of two operators per line to an organization of three operators for lines.
Sanofi also wanted to reduce the load carried by the operators working on the line. Even if the cardboard boxes are not very heavy individually – between three and eight kilos – the total weight lifted over a day is between 300 and 700 kilos per person. It was therefore decided to automate and robotize the end of the packaging line and to do so with collaborative robotics.