Metal Fabricator Eliminates Pallet Wrapping Bottleneck with Automated Orbital Wrapper

Metal fabrication company Penn Sheet Metal, Allentown, Pennsylvania, has cut the time required to stretch wrap its pallet loads of architectural and roofing components and custom decorative building products from an average of 15 minutes per load to 60 seconds or less by replacing manual stretch-wrapping with the automated TAB Wrapper Tornado orbital wrapping machine. Releasing a bottleneck in the packaging department that threatened the company’s stellar lead times, the TAB Wrapper Tornado automatically wraps stretch wrap 360 degrees around and under the pallet and load while it is raised on a forklift to create a secure, unitized load without banding or boxes. The orbital wrapper safely encases the full length of the fabricator’s custom 10- and 16-foot long pallets required for many of the elongated metal parts.
Speeding production while reducing the number of workers involved in the wrapping process from two or three to just one worker, the orbital wrapper saves an average of 2-1/2 hours per day or more than 78 full, eight-hour workdays per year, according to Mike Roeder, president of Penn Sheet Metal.
“We were wasting so much time wrapping pallets by hand until I’d finally had enough,” says Roeder.
“Now we’re getting a much better, more secure wrap every time, even on our longest skids and it wouldn’t even be possible to wrap them by hand – I just love this machine!”
The orbital wrapping machine is designed and manufactured by TAB Industries, Reading,
Pennsylvania. TAB offers a range of automated and semi-automated orbital wrappers in several sizes to suit nearly any pallet wrapping requirements.