A craft beverage line cut changeover from 90 minutes to 54 with a single Universal Robots cobot
A regional craft brewery in Manatee County running two filling lines: a high-speed bottling line at 480 BPM and a slower variety-pack line that handles 14 SKUs across three formats. The variety-pack line was the bottleneck on plant-wide throughput.
Industrial Automation
Universal Robots · Robotiq · Cognex · Allen-Bradley
The problem
Every SKU change on the variety-pack line meant 90 to 110 minutes of downtime: drain and flush, swap the change-parts kit, manually reposition the case packer guides, run a calibration loop on the labeler, and qualify the first 50 cases. Across 22 changeovers a week, that's roughly 35 hours of lost production every week — about 1,800 hours a year. Operations had been pushing for either a second variety-pack line ($2.1M, 18-month lead time) or a packaging contract with an outside co-packer.
The bottleneck wasn't the line speed. It was the human work of repositioning two case packer guide rails and a label-application head between SKUs. Both tasks required precision (within 0.5 mm) and were done by hand by senior operators who already had ten other things to do during a changeover.
“We were two months from signing a co-packer agreement. The cobot cell paid for itself before that contract would have started.”
What we did
We specified a UR10e cobot mounted on a custom steel pedestal between the case packer and labeler, with a Robotiq Hand-E gripper for the rail handoff and a Cognex In-Sight 2800 vision sensor for label-head positioning verification. We wrote the program in URCap so the line operator selects the SKU on a single 7-inch HMI and the cobot positions both stations in 90 seconds — in parallel with the wash-down and parts-kit swap. The vision system validates the first three labels coming off the new SKU before the line is released.
We staged the integration in our Tampa shop on a mocked-up rail section and ran 200 cycles before shipping the cell to the brewery. On-site commissioning was three days. We trained two shifts of operators in person and left a recorded walkthrough plus a one-page laminated runbook at the cell.
The result
Changeover time dropped from a 90-minute average to 54 minutes — a 40% reduction. Plant-wide throughput on the variety-pack line increased by an effective 19% without any change in line speed or staffing. The capital request for the second variety-pack line was permanently shelved. ROI on the cell came in at 9 months including the engineering hours.
Components used
- UR10e collaborative robot Universal Robots
- Hand-E parallel gripper Robotiq
- In-Sight 2800 vision sensor Cognex
- Custom steel pedestal & guarding (Adams shop-built)
- Allen-Bradley CompactLogix integration Allen-Bradley
