Three manufacturers hit 98% uptime with pay-per-month palletizing robots

Three manufacturers hit 98% uptime with pay-per-month palletizing robots

Boxed Water Is Better runs three robotic palletizing systems across its facilities without owning a single robot. The beverage manufacturer pays a flat monthly rate to Formic, a robotics-as-a-service provider, and counts each system as permanent headcount in its staffing plan.

The company recently hosted a panel discussion at its Holland, Michigan plant, bringing together operations leaders from across the Midwest to see the systems running live production. Two other manufacturers joined Boxed Water's operations manager Rick Kulas on stage: a VP from a residential coatings company and a plant manager from an industrial chemicals supplier. All three run the same subscription model for end-of-line palletizing.

Their combined message: the technology works, the economics are straightforward, and the biggest surprise is how little breaks.

Why it matters

Mid-sized manufacturers have historically faced a capital allocation problem with automation — large upfront costs, stranded assets when products change, and dependency on scarce in-house robotics expertise. The robotics-as-a-service model removes those barriers by bundling hardware, maintenance, programming updates, and contracted uptime guarantees into a predictable operating expense. For labor-intensive processes like palletizing, where case weights range from 28 to 30 pounds and manual stacking creates both ergonomic risk and quality inconsistency, the shift from capex to opex changes the adoption calculus entirely.

From three-shift manual stacking to infrastructure-grade reliability

When Kulas joined Boxed Water in 2022, the operation ran three shifts, seven days a week, with manual palletizing across multiple lines. A half-liter case weighs 28 pounds. At peak volume, lines move two to five cases per minute.

"People get tired after eight hours," Kulas said during the panel. "Ten hours is even worse. And even though we rotate through the positions, nobody wants to do it. It's heavy and then people quit and then you don't have anybody there for production."

Boxed Water now operates three robotic systems: a collaborative robot that moves between lines, a compact industrial robot on the highest-volume line, and a third system at the company's Salt Lake City facility. The systems have achieved 98% uptime. Kulas no longer brings in seasonal temporary labor for palletizing.

What surprised him most wasn't labor savings — it was consistency. "The cobot puts the case exactly where it needs to be. It's not leaning. We don't have to worry about how it stretch-wraps or how it goes up in our racks," he said. Before automation, double-wall cases that bowed slightly would produce unstable pallet stacks. The robot compensates automatically.

Kulas described the setup the way operations managers describe reliable infrastructure: "It's like having an air compressor that just runs and you don't worry about it."

Capital barriers and two-week ROI windows

The panel addressed the question every attendee brought: what held you back from automating sooner?

For one panelist, it was the assumption that automation was only for large companies. For Kulas, it was capital. "We're a small company. The capital outlay was a big thing for us," he said. "Explaining it as a set rate, or how many hours we run versus financing 130 grand for a robot and figuring out how long it takes to pay that back, when I don't have technical support in house, was the issue."

The robotics-as-a-service model includes maintenance, spare parts, and contracted uptime with financial penalties if the provider misses performance targets. Contracts can start as short as three months.

When asked about return on investment timelines, one panelist answered "two weeks." Kulas called his ROI instantaneous — the first pallet the cobot built was better than anything produced manually. The third panelist reported the same result, as freed-up labor moved immediately to higher-value tasks.

One manufacturer described a fully manual process where a single pallet of finished product took one person two to three hours to build, with each unit weighing about 30 pounds. That three-hour build now takes 20 minutes.

What broke the adoption barrier

For the third panelist, seeing the technology running live at a trade show was the turning point. Realizing the service model meant the company wouldn't be on its own if something failed made the decision straightforward.

Kulas's biggest surprise was execution quality compared to previous automation projects. "You get promised the world and you get half a cup full of nothing," he said. "This wasn't the case."

Another panelist highlighted durability: "It just keeps on going."

One manufacturer's team named their robot and has asked, seriously, whether it can be programmed to give a high five. Kulas's two cobots are named after former employees "to remember them by."

The event drew plant managers, operations leads, and maintenance coordinators from canning operations, fresh apple packing companies, chemical manufacturers, and home goods co-packers across West Michigan. Many were early in evaluating automation. Several had attempted to purchase equipment outright and encountered familiar problems: stranded assets, knowledge gaps when technical staff departed, and slow vendor support.

Details of the panel discussion and facility tour were first reported by Food Dive.