The Beumer Group offers a new solution for the economical and automated packaging of pallets. The patented Beumer stretch hood prevents tampering, damage and other impacts during storage and transport.
„Stability, safety and protection of goods are crucial for maximising profitability, minimising waste and avoiding returns when storing or retrieving goods. Covering a pallet with film is the easy part. Ensuring that the contents are centred, accurately weighed and measured before final packaging requires repeatable accuracy and consistency that can only be achieved with automation. Thanks to our stretch hooding process, an automated solution can easily be applied at the end of the packaging line. Our solution minimises the likelihood of human error at this critical stage and ensures a stretch wrap that protects against spoilage, damage or theft.“
Jörg Spiekermann, Head of Sales Division Consumer Goods at the Beumer Group
The area of application of the Beumer stretch hood ranges from the Packaging of high-quality electronic items, food and beverages and palletised building materials. It is used both in front of the high-bay racking to secure incoming goods on pallets and for final packaging at the outgoing goods area for dispatch and transport. The stretch hooding process is equally suitable for transparent film, under which the palletised product is visible, and for opaque film to cover high-quality goods where safety is paramount.
The stretch hood achieves the following vertical and horizontal restoring forces of the film to maximise load stability. The film is highly flexible and adapts to a wide range of product dimensions. Thanks to the use of cold-stretchable films, the system does not require any heat input, so the film cannot stick together. In addition eliminates the need to cool the film weld seam with blast air, This keeps the operating costs of the system low.
Attached once, Protects the foil bonnet against the ingress of moisture and dirt and holds the products firmly in place so that the pallets can be moved and stacked safely without slipping. The bonnet also reduces the likelihood of goods being „lost“ during transport. Jörg Spiekermann explains: „Normal stretch wrap packaging is tempting for unauthorised persons because it can be detached and reattached. With film bonnets, on the other hand, any external intervention is immediately recognisable.“ Thanks to the recent introduction of the Beumer stretch hood, a Beumer Group customer has reduced losses between the dispatch point and the destination from four per cent to almost zero (0.03 per cent).
The individual design of the system depends on the customer's requirements, e.g. the use of forklift trucks and transport trolleys, the manual lifting effort and the height to which the pallets need to be lifted. Depending on the set-up, conventional or low roller conveyors and integrated lifting systems are used, for example. The Beumer stretch hood can Designed as a linear system or installed around corners to fit on a smaller footprint. Third party equipment such as labelling systems or platform scales etc. can be considered. The design can also include a compressor if the customer does not have a compressed air connection.
„Manual work is still required for labelling and loading and unloading, but automated guided vehicles (AGVs), i.e. driverless transport systems (DTS), will probably be used for transport in the future. Beumer's customised solutions are already working towards a fully automated scenario, which will also extend the principle of the dark warehouse to packaging.“
Jörg Spiekermann
Source: Beumer
