A major world-wide maker of chocolate products finds a “sweet” material-handling solution

 

The Skilled Group has extensive end-of-production line experience in the food sector, but that expertise is now much richer thanks to the latest partnership between a well-known multi-national maker of chocolates, candies, crackers and cookies and Skilled Group.  Most of us would recognize the famous chocolate bars with the lilac-colored packaging, or the chocolate bars with that distinctive triangular prism shape, but we don’t know how much planning and effort has gone into getting our chocolates to us faster, fresher and more profitably.

This food sector giant approached Skilled Group with their need to match their production automation capabilities with robotic palletizing system solutions in Birmingham (UK) and Bern (CH). Furthermore, there is an additional large Multi-Million Dollar system underway in Toronto (CA) with a first quarter 2018 launch date.  Skilled Group was also awarded a project to supply another premium chocolate maker a system for its facilities in Oloron-Sainte-Marie (FR), with a last quarter 2017 launch date.

These robotic automation system solutions were built by Skilled Group on a common platform to allow the companies to increase overall production output within their current facilities while working within a limited work-space envelope. The solutions provided are proven 24/7 lights-out technology applications. The new systems are capable of handling change-over to a wide variety of different product SKUs during normal production hours – without system down time.  This system increases overall efficiency and production throughput to enable a high yield and fast ROI to the customer.

The Customer’s overall production system, now combined with their new automated system incorporates the latest state-of-the-art safety technology to provide their personnel a safe working environment which will prevent injuries and reduce worker compensation costs including the related time an employee may spend away from work.

In addition, in order to ensure uninterrupted production, Skilled Group divisions offer customers the opportunity to purchase a service and maintenance contract to provide a quicker response time and which can cover many maintenance and repair tasks for all of the Skilled Group robotic systems used throughout the end-of-production line processes.