Elm Electrical Advances in the Realm of Robotics
No one likes loading boxes onto a pallet. But machines don’t seem to mind.
Mike Holmberg noted as much as he pointed to a neatly palletized pile of boxes from a liquor distributor. In a non-automated facility, he said, someone would be loading those by hand.
“They’re making the different spirits, and then they put them in a bottle, put the bottle inside a case, then the case comes down a conveyor, and some person is picking up each one of these, and they’re stacking it in this stack, all day long. It’s not a fun job,” said Holmberg, senior vice president at Elm Electrical in Westfield.
“So we developed a solution for a robotic palletizer,” he said, pointing to the robotic arm and related equipment on Elm’s engineering floor. “It will now take the box as it’s coming off the conveyor, pick it up, and build this pallet. That’s called robotic palletizing.
“It’s a huge labor saver. And it’s about safety, too. It’s backbreaking. And it’s also work that people don’t want, so they don’t last. And in today’s day and age, it’s hard to find employees,” he went on. “Customers, manufacturers in particular, are having difficulty keeping those kinds of jobs filled. You’ve got to train them, they have to go through all the safety protocols, and then they come in and work for a few days and go, ‘hey, I don’t want to do this,’ and they’re out of here. Now you have to start over.”
On this recent afternoon, Holmberg led BusinessWest on a tour of the floor where it builds, programs, tests, and demonstrates robotic equipment in a growing automation division that serves clients in a number of fields.