Unilever is one of the world’s largest companies within the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry and the owner of around 400 brands, available in over 190 countries. The company has four production plants in Poland. One of them, in the town of Katowice, specializes in packing tea delivered to the factory in 25 kilogram sacks. Cartons with the ready-to-sell product packed by employees to boxes are placed on pallets by six UR10 collaborative robots.

The business transformation

The use of cobots shortened the palletizing time, optimized work ergonomics, and relieved employees from the most strenuous tasks. The Unilever plant in Katowice employs around 400 people working in two production halls. Dariusz Ratajczak, Automation Senior Specialist at Unilever, explains that for a long time the company faced difficulties in keeping and finding employees for monotonous, manual tasks related to packaging and palletizing – tasks that were often also strenuous due to the product sizes handled. Unilever needed a solution automating these processes; however, finding a flexible robot with appropriate payload and reach, as well as intuitive handling and programming was challenging. Particular tasks were to be divided into subprocesses in order to systematically automate individual phases, freeing people from strenuous tasks and involving them in more value-added ones.

"Each year a decreasing number of people apply for positions related to palletizing but in our plants this is a key process which has to be performed efficiently,” explains Dariusz Ratajczak, Automation Senior Specialist at Unilever. “For packaging we needed a robot with enough reach of the arm. The task that the robot needed to fulfill consisted in picking various boxes with tea and placing them on a pallet.”