Palletizers Feed the
Unit-Loading Beast
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by John Bryan
Ah, the good old days: Papers streamed off a rumbling press, were crunched into bundles and thrown into open-backed trucks, which careened through rainy city streets, the guy in the back throwing bundles in the general direction of the proper street corner.
How romantic—the stuff of movies. How inefficient—the staple of automation.
First we had to get the paper out of pre-press and onto the press faster. Now we must get it off the press and through the mailroom faster.
Which leads to “unit loading,” the latest fashion for the well-equipped packaging operation. Newspaper bundles are loaded onto pallets or into plastic buckets, creating a voracious appetite at the loading dock. And the beast always must be fed. You can, of course, speed up the conveyor belt. But when the conveyor is going full-tilt (think Lucille Ball at the candy factory), and it still isn’t enough, what then?
You can invest beaucoup bucks in another conveyor system.
Or you can change the process.
To that end, Quipp, a longtime supplier of packaging stuff, says it’s come up with a machine that stacks and wraps bundles wickedly fast—50 bundles a minute.
It’s the Quipp Palletizer/Wrapper, a rectangular hunk of machinery that takes in bundles at the top and pallets at the bottom. In the middle, bundles are stacked on a pallet, and as each layer is finished, it’s wrapped in plastic. This prevents unsightly “pallet bulge,” the scourge of mailrooms the world over.
“It takes an hour and 15 minutes to unload a truck using the bundle method,” says Angel Arribel, vice president of sales for the Miami company. “With unit loading, it takes 20 minutes.”
Bingo—you’re speeding up delivery, keeping pace with the press and saving a bundle (of cash, not papers).
The Quipp machine has vaulted from the drawing board and now is being tested at the Denver Rocky Mountain News. If all goes well, it will keep the newspaper from having to invest millions in another conveyor-belt system just to keep up with the presses.
Which could both enhance the Rocky’s bottom line and keep its beast well fed.
Bryan is a member of the Los Angeles Times’ editorial-pagination project team. E-mail, John.Bryan@latimes.com.