SIG said it enables food and beverage manufacturers to increase workflow efficiency while reducing the amount of manual labor they require. This means manufacturers can develop fully automated filling plants and keep up with growing consumer demands and advances within connectivity and digitalization.
Stefan Mergel, senior product manager equipment at SIG, said, “With this next-generation sleeve magazine, SIG created a highly robust, stable and reliable solution that is designed to cater to all filling machines in our current machine portfolio, making it a key component in building the fully automated filling lines of the future – and helping manufacturers save time and costs in the process.”
R-CAM 2 is a robotic sleeve magazine consisting of two parts: a pallet magazine and an unpacking station, with the former offering space for two Euro pallets or industrial pallets. SIG’s latest sleeve magazine is designed to automatically remove shipping boxes from the pallet, open them, and then load the filling machine with carton sleeves. This allows customers to operate an end-to-end filling line with one operator.
Other R-CAM 2 features include being able to run continuously for up to 2.5 hours without the need to change a pallet, and the ability to compress and pack empty shipping boxes.
Arla Foods has acquired the first R-CAM 2. Already familiar with the first iteration of SIG’s robotic sleeve magazine – again as the first manufacturer to acquire one in 2015 – Arla Foods wanted to achieve greater levels of efficiency.
Peter Bratsch, project manager packaging at Arla Foods Germany, said, “In order to meet our smart factory goals while placing more focus on employee productivity and efficiency, we required a sleeve magazine that needed no manual intervention from an operator. A sleeve magazine that could free up our employees to concentrate on other responsibilities – in addition to reducing their physical workload. With R-CAM 2, we can optimize the performance of all our filling lines, no matter how many carton packs they are designed to fill per hour.”