OTTO partners with Conveyor & Automation to deliver ahead-of-the-curve automation

The task

Conveyor & Automation Technologies, Inc. (C&A), is a full systems integrator servicing the food, beverage, and consumer goods industries. They count Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz, and Colgate-Palmolive among their customers. Their engineers manufacture and implement customized, integrated production lines with state-of-the-art controls. They can integrate conveyor lines for multiple products, robotic case packing for multiple products, robotic assembly of multiple products, and multiple line robotic automation.

One of the company’s priorities is to stay ahead of the development curve in materials handling environments.

“Automating processes is crucial to profitability, to repeatability and productivity,” says Lilly Sarikas, president of the company. “It’s critical to staying competitive in the marketplace. We are looking constantly to partner with new companies that are bringing this kind of technology to the forefront and seeing how we can apply it in an environment it has never been applied to before.”

Gus Sarikas, VP of Sales and Marketing, adds, “The typical processes are becoming obsolete. Our customers need to find ways to produce their product quicker but at the same time they need flexibility.”

One of C&A’s customers—a Fortune 500 company—operates a 200,000-square-foot manufacturing facility. A fast-paced manufacturer that produces bottle caps, they contracted C&A to upgrade their line. C&A in turn searched for automation partners who would help their customers exponentially increase their productivity.

The solution

“We interviewed SDV manufacturers and we quickly eliminated quite a few,” says Lilly. “We didn’t feel that the product was robust enough for the application we had, and we didn't have a level of confidence in the people behind that product to really produce the result we wanted.”

C&A was searching not only for a robust product. They also wanted to work with a company that would also continue to invest in the future. “OTTO offered us flexibility and the more robust solution for an industrial environment,” says Gus.

Both companies began their partnership with educating each other in their respective areas of expertise.

“We built a very good relationship with OTTO, and their project management team and engineering team,” says Steve Ryan, a project manager with the company. “They are as dedicated as we are to coming up with the final solution for the end user.”

For this end user, the system uses the OTTO 100 to pick up and deliver to filling stations and then to drop off the full product to their conveyor line. There, the OTTO 1500 picks up the full pallets and delivers them to a stretch wrapper. The updated line replaced a space-wasting conveyor system with self-driving vehicles.

Working with OTTO Motors allows Conveyor & Automation Technologies to offer their customers an array of solutions. The results have left many industry experts surprised. “We have been bringing people by who have been in the packaging industry for decades,” says Lilly. “And to watch their mouth drop open is quite exciting. You can see immediately that they’re thinking: ‘This is an option I never knew was available.’”

Conveyor & Automation Technologies recommends OTTO Motors to other automation and packaging companies.