DESCRIPTION
BLBP Pocklington produces wetcast concrete slabs. To meet customer demand, Patio Project Packs are supplied with a range of slab sizes. The line could not produce a range of different sized slaps in a production run, as different designs of volumetric dosing box portals were required for different slab sizes. The line was therefore set up to produce single size packs.
A team of 6 operatives were employed for 6 hours every Saturday to build projects packs from the single sized packs. This involved manually handling slabs ranging from 25kg to 7 kg and transferring them by hand onto a new pallet to build the mixed sized patio packs. Each operative was manually handling up to 12 tonnes of slabs a session, in total 3,600 tonnes per annum being manually handled in pack production. The site team felt it was unacceptable to continue with this process.
It was identified that the system could be re-designed to create a total of 8 portals so that a single dosing box could successfully fill a range of sizes without being changed. The order of the moulds and their placement in the curing system was changed to reflect the make-up of the patio packs. This allows them to be recovered in the correct order to build the patio pack using the existing robot. Sets of new moulds were purchased and the packing line adjusted to handle both a standard pallet and patio pack pallet.
BENEFITS
- Patio packs production now fully automated
- Risk of manual handling injuries creating multi packs eliminated
- System developed by site team improving morale and safety culture
- Modifications cost £23K, completed during planned maintenance shut-down.