Automation Solutions for Sterilization Operations
Enhance your sterilization operations with advanced automation solutions that optimize product handling, ensure full regulatory compliance, and boost operational efficiency from product intake to sterilization completion. Our solutions preserve pallet integrity and maintain product serialization throughout the workflow, safeguarding accuracy and ownership as items from multiple owners navigate the system. Experience significant time savings, reduced labor costs, and improved productivity with our scalable, end-to-end automation solutions designed to support your growth.
Revolutionize Your Sterilization Facility with Automation
Watch the video below to see how AMT developed and implemented a material handling solution to maximize efficiency and safety for a sterilization process.
Technology for Automating Sterilization Operations
Leverage cutting-edge technology to optimize your sterilization facility. Here’s how our advanced material handling systems for most sterilization processes (E-beam, X-ray, Gamma UV, and EtO) can make your operation faster and more efficient.
Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs)
AMRs automate key steps to reduce manual labor and enhance productivity by:
- Unloading area management with pallet jack AMRs
- Moving products to and from the sterilization chamber palletizing and depalletizing work cells
- Delivery to shrink wrapping stations to secure product
- Quarantine storage transport, where AMRs move sterilized pallets of product into isolation until they are cleared for shipping
- Pre-shipping staging from quarantine to reverse staging
Robotic Palletizing and Depalletizing
Robotic cells play a critical role in the sterilization process, as robotic palletizing and depalletizing ensure seamless product handling before and after sterilization. AMRs deliver products to robotic cells where they are depalletized for sterilization. Products are then re-palletized, maintaining integrity throughout the process, especially when multiple product owners are involved.
Palletizing and depalletizing robotically offers numerous benefits, especially for sterilization facilities.
Autonomous Fork Lifts and Pallet-Jacks
AMT and MiR have partnered to provide an autonomous solution to pallet jacks. The MiR1200 Pallet Jack is a cutting-edge solution for smarter, faster material handling. It offers seamless pallet detection, transport, and delivery, even across multiple floors, combining intelligence, power, and industrial-grade quality.
Key Features:
- AI-based pallet detection enables precise recognition of shrink-wrapped pallets, ensuring reliable transport.
- Built with an IP52 rating and developed with Logitrans, the MiR1200 is engineered for tough environments and ensures reliable performance.
- High battery capacity and fast charging support continuous workflows with minimal downtime.
- Safety and obstacle avoidance through load-jam detection and 360-degree safety coverage, the MiR1200 complies with the ISO 3691-4 safety standard, ensuring safe operations.
Integrating the autonomous forklifts into your process eliminates manual handling, improves speed, and ensures the safe movement of sterilized goods.
Automated Material Management for Sterilization Facilities
From Inbound to Outbound
From the moment products arrive at the sterilization facility to when they’re shipped out again, our automation solutions streamline every phase of the process. The operation involves four key stages, each optimized through advanced robotics and automation technologies.
Incoming Goods to Staging -Pallet Handling
This step is critical in the process, focusing on the initial handling of incoming goods. When products arrive by truck, they are unloaded and moved to a designated staging area. Here, pallets are prepared for the subsequent sterilization process. Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) or pallet jacks are commonly used at this stage to transport the products efficiently, minimizing manual handling and ensuring a smooth flow of goods from the unloading point to the staging area.
This automation helps improve productivity, reduce labor costs, and enhance overall safety in the facility.
Induction into the Sterilization Process
Robotic material handling systems are employed to depalletize the goods and arrange them appropriately. This automation ensures that each item is correctly routed and precisely aligned according to sterilization requirements, facilitating a seamless flow into the chamber.
By using robotics, the process reduces human error, maintains consistent handling standards, and optimizes the throughput of goods ready for sterilization. This step is essential for maintaining both product integrity and the efficiency of the sterilization cycle.
Post-Sterilization Handling - Storage and Quarantine
Following sterilization, products are reassembled onto pallets for safe transport. This reassembly step includes shrink-wrapping each pallet to secure the items, ensuring stability during storage and subsequent handling.
Once wrapped, the sterilized products are moved to a quarantined, secure storage area designed to maintain post-sterilization integrity. Here, only automated systems, such as robotic pallet movers and conveyors, handle the items to prevent any contamination or human contact, reinforcing the safety and security of the sterilized products before their release into distribution. This automated approach enhances traceability, minimizes contamination risks, and upholds strict regulatory standards.
Final Staging and Shipping
In the final stage, automated systems take over to transport sterilized products from storage to the shipping area. This setup ensures a swift and secure transition to the loading dock, where sterilized items are loaded back onto trucks for delivery.
Autonomous forklifts or AMRs efficiently handle this process, ensuring that products are loaded accurately, minimizing handling time, and maintaining strict hygiene standards. This automated loading approach enhances operational reliability, maximizes system performance, and ensures that products are safely on their way to their destinations with minimal human intervention.
A standout feature of this system is pallet integrity, which guarantees that products are repalletized in the exact configuration as when they entered the process. This consistency is essential for maintaining shipment integrity and facilitating accurate ownership tracking.
Our advanced material handling system further enhances this by reliably identifying each product, ensuring that ownership and tracking remain intact, even when products from multiple owners pass through the same facility. This meticulous tracking capability not only preserves product integrity but also streamlines inventory management, supporting smooth and secure logistics across the entire facility.
Protect Pallet Integrity
Pallet integrity is maintained through precise tracking and reassembly of products onto pallets in their original configuration after sterilization. This process is supported by serialized tracking, which safeguards against misplaced items and ensures that each company’s products are kept distinct and correctly organized from start to finish. Serialized tracking provides a unique identifier for each product, allowing seamless traceability and accountability, which is especially important in multi-owner facilities.
This approach reinforces both the integrity of individual shipments and the overall reliability of the sterilization and handling process.
Prevent Cross Contamination
AMT’s solutions incorporate physical barriers within robotic work cells to ensure a strict separation between sterilized and unsterilized products. These barriers maintain regulatory compliance and enhance safety by preventing any risk of cross-contamination. By minimizing or eliminating human contact, the system effectively uses buffer zones as protective spaces to uphold the integrity of treated products.
These robotic work cells create a controlled environment where sterilized products remain isolated, ensuring a contamination-free process that meets stringent safety standards and enhances the overall reliability of the facility.
Ensure Safe Handling
Our robotic solutions boost throughput quality by reducing the risk of product damage during handling, ensuring each item is carefully managed throughout the process. Enhanced quality control is achieved through photographic product documentation, which is captured by the robotic systems at each stage. This documentation provides a visual record that aids in tracking and quality assurance, enabling swift identification of any issues and confirming product condition.
This level of monitoring not only safeguards product integrity but also enhances accountability and traceability, contributing to a robust quality control framework.
Boost Operational Efficiency
Our robotic solutions accelerate critical steps such as transport and palletizing, significantly reducing manual labor and increasing overall throughput. This efficiency boost leads to faster, more consistent operations, where products move swiftly from one stage to the next with minimal delays.
By automating these key processes, we enhance reliability, reduce the potential for human error, and allow the workforce to focus on higher-value tasks. This streamlined workflow not only maximizes productivity but also ensures that operations remain agile and responsive to demand fluctuations.
Case Study - Transforming Sterilization with Automation
A global sterilization leader needed an efficient solution to manage high product volumes while maintaining strict regulatory compliance. Previously reliant on manual labor, their operations faced constraints in throughput and rising costs. Seeking a shift to automation, they aimed to streamline critical steps within the sterilization process, minimizing human intervention to enhance productivity and consistency.
Additionally, the client grappled with uncertainty regarding damaged products, struggling to identify whether issues arose from manufacturing, transport, or the sterilization process. They needed a reliable system that documented product integrity upon entry and exit from their facility, proving that products remained undamaged during sterilization. This documentation would eliminate doubts, safeguard their reputation, and provide transparency, reassuring all parties involved.
Case Study - Transforming Sterilization with Automation
A leader in global sterilization needed a solution to manage large volumes of products efficiently while ensuring compliance with stringent regulatory standards. Their operations relied heavily on manual labor, limiting throughput and increasing costs. The client sought a way to automate critical steps in their sterilization process to reduce human intervention and optimize productivity.
Watch the video below to see how AMT developed and implemented a solution to maximize efficiency and safety for their sterilization process.
Get in Touch with the AMT Team
Introducing ROBiN Robotic Induction for Sterilization Handling
The ROBiN system plays an important role in enhancing the efficiency of sterilization handling. ROBiN is a multi-functional robotic solution that integrates seamlessly into the sterilization workflow, automating the induction process for both unsterilized and sterilized products.
Precise Induction
ROBiN ensures the correct alignment and positioning of products as they are prepared for sterilization, reducing errors and optimizing throughput.
Automated Sorting and Handling
This robotic system efficiently sorts and handles products, ensuring that they are correctly routed to the sterilization chamber.
Post-Sterilization Reassembly
Once products are sterilized, ROBiN assists in re-palletizing and preparing them for wrapping and quarantine, maintaining strict pallet integrity throughout the process.
ROBiN is particularly valuable in environments where large volumes of products require precise handling, significantly reducing manual intervention while improving overall operational efficiency. By incorporating ROBiN into your facility, you can achieve streamlined workflows, maintain strict safety standards, and enhance throughput.
All Services Related to Manufacturing Automation Under One Roof
As the sterilization industry evolves, our solutions are ready to grow with you. We are continually innovating and expanding into new technologies to provide strong solutions for our clients’ success.
AMT’s Engineering Services Department offers more than 75 technical professionals who execute robotics and automation services. We are your resource and partner for automation.
