B-Loony puts universal robots gold edition robot to work

Alec Jackson, RARUK, and James Clephan, B-Loony

B-Loony was a recent winner of a Gold Edition cobot from Universal Robots. The new addition will join six existing UR3 cobots on site, all of which are being used to increase productivity in previously laborious manual tasks and help the company gain vital market share. The cobots have been supplied by RARUK Automation.

B-Loony is a £7 million turnover, 65-employee business.

It recently achieved FSSC 22000 certification for its food-safe gourmet food flag manufacturing process. In 2014, the company received its first enquiry for 250 food flags. This was followed by an order for 500, then 1000, then 5000, then 10,000. As a relatively intricate manual assembly operation, the company decided that automation was the way forward.

“The problem we faced with finding an automated solution, was precision,” explained James Clephan, Operations Director at B-Loony. “The flag’s skewer has to be placed on the exact centre of the adhesive flag, so that when it folds over the edges align neatly.”

Clephan visited the PPMA exhibition that year and spotted RARUK Automation demonstrating a UR cobot on its stand. The UR3 was busy picking up small dowels from a bowl feeder and Clephan immediately saw the potential for his own application.

B-Loony said that it has gained significant market share and can now produce 400,000 food flags a week, which equates to around 20 million a year, and with demand

rising, further capacity through automation is planned.Four UR3 cobots from RARUK Automation now serve this area of the business on a 24-hour shift pattern.

“RARUK Automation have been great from the outset,” added Clephan. “As this was our first foray into robotics, they initially lent us a UR3 so that we could gain confidence from the unit and see that it worked in the way we wanted. This proved to be an invaluable experience.”

“The collaborative aspect of the UR3 cobots is pertinent in this respect,” he says. “Any workers who have had their jobs replaced by a cobot today work alongside the units. They have been upskilled and now manage the automation function of the operation. Some were naturally sceptical at first, but now they’ve seen it for themselves, our workforce has bought into the idea.”

B-Loony has continued to invest in UR3 cobots, since adding a further two units for a different purpose: bunting production. “With the recent royal wedding and World cup, bunting is in vogue again and we have witnessed a huge surge in demand,” said Clephan. “Our sewing machines were manually fed, we now have two UR3 cobots performing this task with more to follow. The Golden Edition cobot, which we were fortunate enough to win recently, will also go into this business area as part of the automation program”

Universal Robots celebrating its 25,000th cobot sale by giving away a Gold Edition unit, shipped free of cost, to one lucky customer. However, due to a huge response and interest from customers all around the world, Universal Robots decided to offer a Gold Edition cobot to a customer in each of its geographical areas worldwide. In Northern Europe, B-Loony was the winner.

“The Golden Edition UR3 will soon be put to work alongside our existing robots, helping us to grow market share by producing two million metres of promotional bunting each year,” said Clephan. RB