工业制造

EFFICIENT MATERIAL FLOW FOR A LEADING DUTCH COOKIE MANUFACTURER

Biscuits and cookies are universally popular and the global market outlook is promising. Global trends like health and well-being on the one hand and indulgence (to make oneself feel better) on the other hand force biscuit manufacturers to shorter innovation cycles and as a result, increased process complexity. Efficient material handling solutions and intelligent automation are becoming prerequisites for success, as illustrated in the case of a leading Dutch cookie manufacturer.

The global cookie market is growing and competition between large, multinational players and local manufacturers in each region is fierce. Price pressure requires biscuit manufacturers to implement lean and efficient processes and invest in intelligent automation solutions.

Product customization requires flexible systems

For a leading industrial cookie producer in the Netherlands, the strategic focus has always been on the optimization of both the products and the production processes. For more than 80 years, the company has produced an ever-growing variety of high-quality cookies, which are sold to consumers worldwide. Despite the worldwide supply of high volumes, the company retains a high level of flexibility, as entry into a new market frequently requires product customization in terms of recipe, size, weight and/or packaging.

The vast range of biscuits and cookies that the company offers has one requirement in common: They are all delicate, fragile and perishable products that need delicate handling and protective packaging to guard against breakage and loss of freshness and flavor. Production machines and especially material handling equipment and associated software packages need to enable operators to carry out fast changeovers and reduce errors while minimizing the risk of product damage.

In early 2015, TBWB was asked to work out an automation concept for its customer’s palletizing operations, which were mainly performed manually and caused a bottleneck for shipping operations. A great variety of biscuit boxes coming out of more than 10 production lines needed to be processed faster: the palletizing capacity should be increased to 3,000 boxes per hour.

Because the tight project timing and the complexity that TBWB, as responsible system integrator, had to deal with, TBWB CEO Bart Friederichs had to rely on trusted project partners:

For TBWB, the main goal in each project is to deliver a turnkey system for our customer. It must work according to their specifications, no matter what. To keep this promise towards our customer, we need project partners we can rely on, like Interroll.