Without Smurfit Westrock's carton and packaging solutions, the shipping of countless goods would not be possible. As the world's leading supplier of sustainable, paper-based packaging, Smurfit Westrock operates over 500 packaging plants and 62 paper mills in 40 countries.
Context
In 2025, Smurfit Westrock faced further increasing customer demands in terms of delivery times, variety of variants and service, as well as high competitive pressure in the corrugated board market. This made stable, highly automated processes in final packaging and logistics absolutely necessary. The palletizing work, which had previously been carried out mainly manually, was physically demanding, monotonous and error-prone – with corresponding effects on sickness rates, employee satisfaction and the risk of complaints. Against this background, the idea of consistently automating the palletizing process was born.
Solution
At the Lauenburg site, three robot-supported, automated palletizing systems from Corrugated Board were introduced for the first time in 2025/26 in order to meet the increased requirements for performance, quality and ergonomics. S4P was responsible for controlling the respective cell with, among other things, IOLink sensors/actuators, Nachi robots and Palomat via OPC UA up to gripper change. The starting point is end-to-end order management with management of packing orders, packages, pallets, grippers and other resources. In an interactive HMI, palletizing templates can be generated automatically. S4P's AI-based algorithms developed in-house are used here to optimize the loading of pallets with packages. The results in practice show a significantly better utilization of the pallets compared to manual loading.
For completely customer-specific loading, a manual packing template designer has been developed, in which the user can place his packages interactively via drag and drop. You can switch between 2D and 3D view.
Modules used:
- 4AVO for Order, Article and Loading Equipment Management
- 4PRO for intralogistics control
- 4SPC for Process Control
- 4MDE for machine data interaction Control of systems and acquisition of machine data
Results and Benefits
With S4P solutions, Smurfit Westrock achieves significantly higher productivity and noticeably shorter throughput times in the end-of-line‑area. Automated palletizing reduces errors and rework, improves ergonomics and occupational safety for employees, and at the same time increases pallet utilization and process stability. In this way, Smurfit Westrock is creating a future-proof, scalable basis for further automation and digitization initiatives along the entire value chain at the Lauenburg site.
Project profile
- Company: Smurfit Westrock Wellpappe Nord
- Location: 21481 Lauenburg/Elbe
- Industry: Corrugated packaging, paper-based packaging solutions for industry and food
- Products: Packaging and packaging materials made of corrugated board (e.g. forfood and industrial goods)
- Employees: 170
- S4P Solutions: 4AVO, 4PRO, 4SPC, 4MDE
Learn more
Learn more about our industry and special solutions for e.g. automated injection molding machines from KraussMaffei powered by S4P. Or find out more about our entire portfolio.