X-Cel Feeds Case Study • Byron Automation

Challenge

Located in Tacoma, WA, X-Cel Feeds makes high quality animal feeds in their processing mill. As a historic building the old mill has operations on multiple floors. The use of space was challenging. The customer wanted to maintain their existing product flow while locating palletizing on the ground floor for easy truck and rail loading. Desired result:

• Increase output
• Decrease labor cost
• Reduce reliance on “strong back labor”

Solution

Byron created an operator free solution; transporting bags via curved belted conveyance from the bag filler, descending thru the second floor to a robotic palletizer on the first floor. The palletizer was fed by an automatic pallet de-nester and slip-sheet applicator. After stacking, the pallet was conveyed to a rain hood station, fully automatic/automated stretch wrapper and finally out to a series of pallet accumulation conveyors. Through-put greatly exceeds what was previously capable with human labor.