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New MultiplePick grippers for order picking of dairy packages

Sep 15, 2004 Cimcorp Headquarter
General Dairy
READING TIME 2 MINS

The MultiPick system, developed for the order picking of full crates of products delivered in plastic crates, has been joined by MultiplePick, which can help to automate the majority of dairy product picking. As well as complete product crates, an automatically picked dispatch unit can now be just one or several rows within a complete crate.

Order picking of individual products and making up a crate have been the most labour intensive stages in dairy picking. Furthermore, the working environment is tough, because picking must be done in the cold as temperatures of +2 ºC are needed to keep the products fresh.
Cimcorp has developed a new gripper, which is suitable for order picking of gable-tops by row. Gable-tops are used for consumer packaging of dairy products, milk, sour milk, cream and yogurts. MultiplePick grippers are also able to pick products sold in tubs (yogurts and soured whole milk) that are delivered in trays.

The patented MultiplePick completes Cimcorp’s solution offerings for automated order picking. The MultiplePick gripper supplied to Valio can hold four rows at a time and can pick either one, two or three rows at one time. Successful handling of gable-tops of different heights (1 l, 0.75 l, 0.5 l and 0.2 l) can be done with the same gripper.

MultiplePick transfers the picked rows to a plastic crate, which becomes a customer-specific mixed crate.

The same MultiplePick gripper can also pick yogurts and soured whole milk that are
delivered in trays. The smallest dispatch unit is a single tray. The gripper can hold two trays at a time. MultiplePick picks the tray from plastic crates, in which two trays lie side by side and transfers the picked trays to a customer-specific plastic crate, which also holds two trays side by side.

MultiplePick only works with the Multi-Pick system, as the MultiPick replenishes the storage area and removes the picked crates to combine them with complete crate orders picked by MultiPick.

The whole order picking system, both the row-picking MultiplePick and the crate-picking MultiPick, are controlled by the Cimcorp OPS order picking control system.