What happened
Dunbia's Cross Hands facility in Wales operates 29 lines and produces around 40,000–45,000 tonnes annually. Food Manufacture reports that a robotic pallet-moving system struggled with variation in customer crate specifications. Site director Carlos Silva said the resulting downtime led the business to remove the system and return the operation to manual forklifts. Dunbia reports an approximately 30% improvement in efficiency following the change.
Why it matters to food manufacturing engineers
This is a useful counterpoint to the assumption that automation automatically improves OEE. Food factories combine short production runs, SKU proliferation, customer-specific packaging, variable raw materials and frequent changeovers. Automation designed around repeatability can become the constraint when the process feeding it is inherently variable.
Operational impact
Automation business cases should include product and container variability, changeover losses, fault-recovery time, intervention frequency, maintainability and operator dependency. The reported 30% improvement is a Dunbia/Food Manufacture figure and has not been independently audited by AFME.
AFME perspective — what to watch
Automation CAPEX should be evaluated against whole-system performance rather than equipment utilisation alone.