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An egg grader is becoming more and more an integral part of a complete solution, something that Moba envisioned a long time ago when the goal was set to migrate from a machine builder to a solution provider.
Beautiful examples of complete solutions can be found in Japan. With an enormous population densities in the urban areas, it is logical that there are no farms to be seen near the inner cities. At the same time, heavy traffic causes longer delivery times to retail in downtown areas — whereas these customers are naturally looking for short delivery times.
Japanese industry is very smart in finding solutions. Moba participated in many projects where this problem was solved in various ways. Most of the solutions come back to two basic scenarios:
In both cases, transport and intermediate storage of eggs are required — and with modern facilities being able to handle volumes of one million eggs per day or more, the traditional Japanese storage systems, where stacks of trays are stored in vertical warehouses, is becoming very inefficient. These systems are very useful for smaller volumes of intermediate storage when grading and packing are done at the same location. In some situations, splitting grading and packing creates a quicker response to retail demands, but compared to an efficiently planned "normal offline packing station" it is a tough business case. On top of that, transporting eggs only on stacks of trays is not economically feasible.
Using plastic cargo pallet systems make storage much more efficient for high volumes and also opens up the capability of transporting the eggs in a very easy way. These plastic egg pallet systems offer excellent protection not only during storage, but also during transport. Due to this, some smart Japanese entrepreneurs started linking Moba equipment to fully automated pallet warehouse systems and also combining pallet storage with transport options.
When such strategies are combined with Moba's software capabilities and project department integrating Moba equipment into high-tech production lines, impressive solutions can be built. The images depict an Omnia PX530 that is operated on a farm with 1.4 million layers. The grader has a throughput of 190,000 eggs/hour, putting roughly one-third of all eggs into Japanese Big Trays that are case-packed automatically in MR10 Casepacking robots. The majority of the output goes on cargo trays, is automatically palletized via MR40 egg palletizing robots and ends up in a fully automated warehouse without any operators involved.
The fact that the eggs are "batched" is very unusual. This batching is a typical Japanese way of creating consumer packs with a targeted total weight and a guaranteed tolerance. Thanks to Moba's individual egg handling, the grader knows exactly the location of individual eggs on the trays. Using traceability information, the data is transferred to the warehouse computer. By storing these eggs in pre-arranged patterns, later repacking can instantaneously create consumer packs with the exact desired total weight.
From the warehouse, these pre-graded eggs of high quality end up in repacking stations in the heart of the urban areas and so combine short delivery times with extremely high egg quality.
Since the Omnia is operated on a farm with relatively low labor availability, a specially designed denester filler was created to reduce labor requirements even further. The complete solution is designed in such a way that only three people are required to operate this fully automated hyper-modern farm installation.