Arla Foods acquires SIG’s R-CAM 2 solution to increase efficiency

With R-CAM 2, SIG developed a new, fully automated sleeve magazine designed to work with all filling machines in its current machine portfolio. With this latest solution, it enables food and beverage manufacturers to increase workflow efficiency while reducing the manual labor they require. Consequently, this means manufacturers can more easily develop fully automated filling plants – and keep up with growing consumer demands and advances within connectivity and digitalization.

In an ongoing bid to help manufacturers stay competitive and keep up with a constantly evolving industry, the company is committed to designing and building filling machines that streamline every stage of their production process. R-CAM 2 is one of SIG’s solutions that enables the company to meet this demand in the market.

Stefan Mergel, Senior Product Manager Equipment at the company: “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. The former offers 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.

R-CAM 2 is also loaded with other time-saving features: from being able to run continuously for up to 2.5 hours without the need to change a pallet to an ability to compress and pack empty shipping boxes – among many other things. 

All of this has led to SIG customer Arla Foods acquiring 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, back in 2015 – Arla Foods wanted to achieve even greater levels of efficiency.

Peter Bratsch, Project Manager Packaging at Arla Foods Germany: “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.” 

With its dedicated Smart Factory platform, SIG is committed to helping food and beverage manufacturers develop smarter and more connected factories. They are providing everything from single systems to complete turnkey solutions. With solutions such as R-CAM 2, which uses IoT-enabled systems, data, and automation, manufacturers can experience higher levels of efficiency, flexibility, and quality. 

The Covid-19 pandemic led to the country-wide lockdown on 25 March 2020. It will be two years tomorrow as I write this. What have we learned in this time? Maybe the meaning of resilience since small companies like us have had to rely on our resources and the forbearance of our employees as we have struggled to produce our trade platforms.

The print and packaging industries have been fortunate, although the commercial printing industry is still to recover. We have learned more about the digital transformation that affects commercial printing and packaging. Ultimately digital will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future.

Web analytics show that we now have readership in North America and Europe amongst the 90 countries where our five platforms reach. Our traffic which more than doubled in 2020, has at times gone up by another 50% in 2021. And advertising which had fallen to pieces in 2020 and 2021, has started its return since January 2022.

As the economy approaches real growth with unevenness and shortages a given, we are looking forward to the PrintPack India exhibition in Greater Noida. We are again appointed to produce the Show Daily on all five days of the show from 26 to 30 May 2022.

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