Established beef export company EC Throsby (ECT) has increased its productivity with a new conveyor system manufactured and installed by Adept Conveyor Technologies.
Founded by Charles Throsby in 1950, the company is now headed by Edward Throsby. Continuing the family tradition, Edward oversees the Australian Beef Processing Plant near Singleton, NSW. ECT invested AU$4 million to upgrade the plant, from which it exports beef to 40 countries. The busy plant produces 20,000 cartons of frozen beef, processing 500 cattle per day.
Of dealing with Adept, operations consultant Peter Sullivan said, “Adept Conveyor Technologies’ engineers provided a first class service by analysing our ideas and problem issues. They carried out some fine tuning of the concept, enabling us to become fully operational within five weeks of signing the order.”
Sullivan says the Adept conveyor system has enabled the plant to eliminate double handing, increase efficiencies and improve safety standards and working conditions for employees. Since installing the conveyor, ECT has seen a 20% boost in production and expects a return on capital investment within five years.
The biggest challenge Adept faced was installation time constraints. “As it was not possible to interrupt daily production, we only had a short window of opportunity to install the conveyor during the 2010 Christmas shutdown of the abattoir, which we achieved as planned,” said Ross Simpson, Adept’s director of engineering.
After packing and barcoding, 60 carton types of beef cuts, each weighing up to 27kg, are conveyed from the boning room to the automated plate freezer. After freezing, the cartons are automatically conveyed to spur lines for palletisation, storage and shipment. During production, the system orientates cartons with the barcode on the appropriate edge so operators can ensure correct palletisation.
The system accommodates the sorting of 140 product lines to seven destinations, where cartons are loaded at 42 different pallet positions. Adept’s system features barcode scanners that allow for variances in bar code quality due to frost build-up and mechanical damage - a vital component of the system’s capability.
The system adapts to high volume throughput surges. High volume lines are allocated specific lanes. Operators then hand-sort low volume lines once full pallets arrive in the cold stores.
The conveyor layout means the cartons must be rotated 90° while moving. To achieve this, Adept designed a carton rotator that accounts for the variation in carton weights. The rotator operates with a peak rate throughput potential of 12 to 15 cartons per minute.
The entire operation is overseen at a touch screen control panel displaying important statistical data such as carton throughput per shift, product line breakdown, numbers of misreads and number of products processed per lane. Product lane sort destinations can also be altered.
“The conveyor system has given us more control over the carton hand-palletising operation,” said Sullivan. “This in turn eased the effort and time required to load shipping containers with forklifts and resulted in better quality product presentations brought about by improving carton shape and reducing damage. The new system has most importantly resulted in a significant improvement in customer product satisfaction.”
“In the final analysis the biggest winner is the customer.”