The FXCB gripping system has a low weight and an integrated pneumatic vacuum generator.

PC Electric Relies on Schmalz Grippers for Carton Handling

PC Electric needed a solution for picking their product containers. Up to now, employees had to label, stack and palletize the boxes manually, which was inefficient and tiring. With a shortage of skilled workers, an automated solution was urgently needed. The company was looking for a way to optimize this process to save time and resources and improve working conditions.

Products used in the application

Features of the success story

Industry	Electrical engineering
Workpiece	Cardboard boxes
Product group	Vacuum Gripping Systems
Type of handling	Automated handling

With Schmalz

700,000

packages

per week

The customer: PC Electric GmbH

PC Electric has been producing electrical connection components at its headquarters in St. Martin im Innkreis, Upper Austria, with more than 350 employees since 1973. These include CEE industrial and earthing contact plugs and sockets, power distributors, cable reels and wall boxes for e-mobility. The products are successfully sold in over 100 countries worldwide. In total, the group employs more than 1,000 employees at five locations in Europe.

The challenge

For shipping, the employees remove plugs, distributors and cable reels from gray plastic boxes and pack them. Round 700,000 packages in seven different sizes with a weight of up to 2.5 kilograms are packed each week. After packing, the cardboard boxes are manually labeled, stacked and then placed on pallets. In the long run, this was not only exhausting for the employees, but also inefficient.

The handling solution met our expectations so well that we installed two more robots with the FXCB area grippers in the picking department at the beginning of this year.

∼ Daniel Lechner, Head of Automation at PC Electric GmbH

The solution from Schmalz

The Schmalz solution for PC Electric is an FXCB area gripping system with integrated vacuum generation. It was specially developed for the automated handling of cardboard. The sealing element of the gripper is a high-performance sealing foam that not only adapts optimally to different workpieces, but also enables very short cycle times thanks to its fast reset. The FXCB area gripping system has no sharp edges and is ideal for human-robot collaboration. At PC Electric, it was installed on a KUKA robot and supplied with compressed air to generate a vacuum. The solution from Schmalz automates the labeling and stacking of shipping cartons: After an employee has placed the products in the cardboard box, he pushes it into the so-called cell. There, the cardboard box is automatically weighed, bonded and provided with a "Tested" label. The FXCB area gripper then lifts the cardboard box again and holds it in front of the labeler, which positions and applies the shipping label correctly. The robot then places the cardboard box on a conveyor belt, which transports the stack onwards as soon as four cardboard boxes are stacked on top of each other. The solution developed by Schmalz not only increases the efficiency of the picking process, but also reduces the workload for employees. The FXCB system also works extremely precisely, which leads to more accurate labeling and stacking of the cardboard boxes and therefore cleaner packaging. In addition, the integrated pneumatic vacuum generation ensures low operating costs and makes the system both ergonomically and economically attractive.