Palletizers and palletizing

Palletizing is one of the handling systems that has developed most rapidly over the last three decades. It consists in grouping a certain number of packages on a support: the pallet; the grouping operation is carried out by a palletizer.

In the early days, parcels were placed on pallets by hand; palletizing workstations were therefore manual and designed so that operators had to make a minimum of movements to achieve good productivity. But very quickly, these workstations had to be redesigned to make them less arduous and improve working conditions. This led to the introduction of palletizing machines, initially semi-automatic, in which the operator had to do the work of arranging or controlling the mechanism, then fully automatic, i.e. capable of working without the presence of an operator.

Parallel to this development in equipment, the packages themselves have also changed. While the first palletizing experiments used packages with no specificity, as palletizers evolved, operators got into the mechanical swing of things by studying packages better suited to palletizing and palletizing.

As palletizing has developed in all sectors of industrial activity, the diversity of products, the quantities produced and the ways in which they are produced have very quickly led to a multitude of palletizer types. The imagination of manufacturers in this field is particularly flourishing, and it became necessary to classify these devices and define their field of application to enable a choice.

This technique requires a specific language, so it will be useful to consult the glossary (Table A) to familiarize ourselves with the terms needed to understand the texts.