Transformed over the weekend

TINE SA is Norway’s largest producer, distributor and exporter of dairy products, with a national market share of about 85%.This company’s backbone is provided by more than 10,000 farmers, who as members of this cooperative are stakeholders in TINE, and every year supply 1.4 billion litres of cow’s milk and 19 million litres of goat’s milk. The group employs almost 5,500 people, and in 2012 achieved a turnover of just under 20 billion Norwegian kroner, corresponding to about 2.3 billion euros. From the milk supplied by the farmers, the group makes more than 500 different dairy articles in 42 facilities (13 of them are fresh milk dairies) spread all over the country. The products are sold under the TINE brand.All in all, however, TINE markets over 1,300 different product lines. To coordinate the production output from the various facilities, and its distribution throughout Norway, TINE operates with 16 different warehouses/distribution centres.

Widely diversified activities

The Norwegian market for dairy products is split: on the one hand, demand for fresh milk has been declining for years. Since 2000, per-capita consumption has fallen by almost one fifth, to what are now 91.6 litres. Fresh milk is manifestly no longer as important to consumers as it used to be. This has meant that the proportion of freshmilk products in TINE’s sales has decreased to around 40% whilst that of solid dairy products, i.e. butter, cheese or sour cream, is catching up. 17.6 kilograms of cheese, 9.8 kg of cream and sour cream, and 3.2 kg of butter is what each Norwegian consumes on average in a year. It is the “Jarlsberg” hard-cheese products, with their typical round holes, that enjoy a particular popularity among Norway’s inhabitants.

Moreover, the ice-cream subsidiary Diplom-Is makes its notinconsiderable contribution to total sales. Almost all Norwegians know this tradition-steeped ice-cream brand, which is the market leader in its segment. TINE’s producer of juices and fruit-juice-based drinks, Fellesjuice AS, achieves a similarly strong performance. And the majority shareholding in the marketing company Fjordland AS, moreover, makes sure that TINE is always a significant player on the market when it comes to developing and launching fresh convenience foods, margarine, yoghurt and desserts. Abroad, TINE is particularly successful in Sweden, Denmark, the UK and the USA, both with export sales and production operations on the spot. Overall, sales achieved outside Norway already account for around 10% of the total, with “Jarlsberg” cheese here being TINE’s most important brand.

Concentrating production capacities

TINE’s biggest fresh-milk plant is located in Oslo. Understandably enough, since the conurbation surrounding Norway’s capital is home to more than 1.9 million people, over a third of the country’s total population of five million. Norway is sparsely populated, with only 13 inhabitants per square kilometre, which is not exactly conducive to the distribution of everyday consumer goods, such as foods and beverages.Against this background, a decentralised production structure is a major advantage.

Nevertheless, TINE knows it has to concentrate its production operations, so as to continue to operate profitably on its chosen markets in the future as well. To give an example: the production capacities of three out of the firm’s 13 dairies are to be redistributed amongst the other plants, with concomitant capacity upsizing in the remaining 10 milk processing facilities. For example in the Oslo plant, whose annual capacity now runs at 150 million litres of milk and 20 million litres of fruit juice and is earmarked for further upsizing.To enable the company to maintain these production output levels throughout all steps of the process, TINE installed the new palletizing centre to start with, and then the company had a new, two-part highbay warehouse built, with 10,748 euro-pallet slots and 3,200 parking slots for rolling containers, which serves to accommodate the fully loaded pallets of merchandise until they are order-picked from there via automated overhead conveyors.

For handling fresh milk, the TINE Meieriet Oslo company has 10 cartoning lines, plus two bag-in-box lines, at its disposal. PET or HDPE bottles for fresh milk have not (yet) become accepted practice in Norway. The cartons of fresh milk are loaded on rolling containers, which are placed on special pallets to harmonise with the new warehouse system.

The new palletising centre from Krones is responsible for the output of a total of six further filling lines. It replaces five conventional palletisers. In these previous lines, the layers were formed by means of external turning stations and mechanical grouping. Each palletiser was assigned one filling line. When then – as part of the capacity upsizing programme – a sixth line was added, it was high time for restructuring.

There are six lines in all: one 250-millilitre brik-pack line for fruit juice rated at 7,000 briks an hour, one 10-litre bag-in-box line for fresh milk filling 450 boxes per hour, two form-fill-seal (FFS) lines for yoghurt, rated at 20,000 and 40,000 tubs an hour respectively, and two lines for filling yoghurt, sour cream and crème fra?che.One of these two lines, each rated at 18,200 tubs an hour, had been a new installation but had initially to be run at 10,000 tubs per hour because the old palletising kit was not able to accommodate the output required.

So what’s arriving for palletising is a disparate array of packaging combinations, such as: various six-tub trays of yoghurt and sour cream, 12-unit trays with fruit-juice brik-packs, 10-litre fresh-milk boxes, six-times-four or three-times-eight packs of yoghurt on fulldepth trays. The centre handles both consumer packs and distribution packs, each of which is printed upstream of the Robobox with barcode and product number, date, time and batch number – data which the ERP supplies to the packaging labelling kit.

Quite a few challenges

One palletising line each looks after the outputs from two filling lines. To link up the lines from their various locations in the plant to the palletising centre, Krones installed more than 500 metres of MultiCo pack conveyors, under what were sometimes extremely difficult conditions. The longest conveyor section is 120 metres long, running through different storeys, and also through areas that are very rarely checked by staff. Some of the pack conveyors pass through hygienically designed zones of milk production and filling, and in some parts existing pipes had to be crossed over, which it was not permitted to divide. All in all, a huge three-dimensional puzzle. But Krones invariably made sure that the conveyors remained accessible, no matter how tight the space constraints became.

Another challenge caused by the huge distance between filling line and palletising centre was coordination of the change-over routine to a different product. This was solved by Krones in the shape of a specifically designed dummy. At any product change-over, this plastic block with metal strips, about double the size of a finished pack, is placed on the conveyor belt by the operator in the filling or packaging zone after the last item of the previous product. It passes through a proximity detector, and only then can the filler be changed over to the next product. When the dummy arrives in the distant palletising centre, the Robobox will stop, and the system operator will be alerted by an alarm. The Robobox and the Modulpal now produce an unfinished pallet with the previous product. Only after they have done that can the new product be handled in the normal way. Using this dummy enables product after product to be processed directly without having to empty the whole line each time. Likewise, at the end of production, the dummy clears all the conveyors, thus making sure that there are no more packs in the line.

Another no less exigent challenge was the space constraints encountered for the new palletising centre. On a footprint of just 25x28 metres, with a maximum height of 5.10 metres, three complete lines, each with infeed from the upper storey, with a Robobox grouping station and a Modulpal palletising robot were installed. For the control cabinets, a second level was incorporated directly underneath the ceiling. The three palletising stations have been erected in parallel and together provide a throughput of 65 pallets an hour. There is still space to accommodate two further systems. The first of these will only be needed when the seventh filling line for a new type of yoghurt tub has been commissioned.

Palletising two different products alternately

Each of the three Modulpal palletisers has one pallet loading position at its disposal on the left and one at the right, so that the machine can load two disparate products from two filling lines alternately. Note that the layer pattern can be completely different, since it is formed by the Robobox, which functions on the principle of positive turning and distribution of the packs, thus doing without specific components, like spacing devices, for example. The easily accessible Modulpal places the finished layers on the pallet by means of a shutter-type gripper head. The pallets are supplied, and taken away, by a double-deck PalCo. The two levels enable the entire pallet handling operation to be positioned on one side, which means the operator side is completely accessible. All conveyors are equipped with a pallet tracking capability, which makes sure that every pallet is individually wrapped, labelled, and passed to the cooling store. Every pallet of fulls is stabilised with a net by a double-head wrapping machine.

Since the yoghurt is produced at warm temperatures, it has to be re-cooled in the cold chain so as to provide it with the requisite biological stability. Every single tub is – directly downstream of the palletising centre – proactively cooled in a cooling cell for up to two hours, down to plus +4o Celsius. Outside the palletising centre, Krones also installed a pallet monitor, which rejects any defective empty pallets even before they are admitted into the palletising zone.

The house-elves did a fine job

Dependable and fast – these were the watchwords for the changeover from the old palletising operation to the new palletising centre. “Without interrupting the delivery chain” was the stipulation posed. Installation proper went off without a hitch. Directly before the startup, staff were trained at the Krones Academy in specially customized courses.

Since the change-over could only take place at the production-free weekend, the old system stopped operations on a Friday, whereupon the Krones people got to work. When on Monday morning technical manager Espen Tyrihjell looked in on the line, he was flabbergasted. He phoned project manager ?smund Amlie on his mobile at once and asked: “What’s going on? All of Krones’ staff have left, and the line is running!” “Yepp”, was the laconic answer, “isn’t that what we wanted?” When she started her shift early on Monday morning, the line operator had simply pressed the green button as usual – and everything started up like clockwork. “Cool story, bro!” says Espen Tyrihjell, “epitomising our perfect cooperation. All our expectations were fully met.

Neither our customers nor the consumers noticed the change-over in the slightest. That was the main thing.” Installation work started at the beginning of February 2013, and as early as in July the final acceptance tests were conducted, for each of the three Robobox/Modulpal combinations with over 99% efficiency.