From Front to End-of-Line, Clevertech Offers Innovative and Sustainable Solutions to Multinational Clients Worldwide
THE COMPANY
Clevertech is a leading company in the industrial automation market, and specializes in the production of packaging solutions for multiple sectors. Clevertech offers design, engineering, and production services for Front, Center, & Endof-line systems based on the best technologies, and presents itself as a unique partner for product handling.
With all engineering centralized in Italy, Clevertech has production facilities in Italy, where the company’s headquarters are located, with 36,000 square meters of production area; in Shanghai-China with 4,000 square meters; in Fort Myers, Florida (USA) with another 3,000 square meters; and finally in Pune (India) with 2,000 square meters.
The company has a worldwide presence with several subsidiaries in locations such as France, England, India, Germany, Poland, and Mexico, which enable it serve as a global partner to its customers. The company surpassed the threshold of 100 million in consolidated sales in 2022, proving to be a reliable partner for multinational companies around the world, having faced the post-Covid difficulties and raw material shortages that characterized last year with resilience and resourcefulness.
The group’s primary objective is to offer a safe and high-performance method of handling packaging, thanks to the fully integrated approach that allows easy use of the plant and optimization of uptime by making it more available for production.
The holistic approach taken by Clevertech helps reduce costs, as thinking holistically means thinking about a machine as a whole, avoiding overlapping functions and maximizing integration between parts. The company’s philosophy is based on quality, reliability, and the safety of its equipment and component parts.
Clevertech pays attention to sustainability and strives to be a certified supplier. Clevertech’s photovoltaic systems enable it to use TÜV SÜD-certified solar energy with an output of 25,537 kWh/year of electricity produced, enabling energy self-sufficiency, and corresponding annual savings of 58,000 kg of CO2. In addition, Clevertech uses only IE3 premium-rated electric motors in systems it delivers to its customers. IE3 motors enable the reduction of CO2 emissions as well as electricity savings.
The Solutions
The Clevertech portfolio comprises front line or depalletizing solutions capable of feeding bottle, pouch, and carton production lines. The Center Line section comprises systems for loading and unloading products such as cans, tubs, pouches or jars and bottles from baskets and trays that must be fed from autoclaves in the food industry.
These systems include the ability to supervise product handling data to ensure traceability and, consequently, consistent quality over time. Finally, for the End of Line section, Clevertech offers solutions for vertical product wrapping, forming, and closing of American cartons, with the ability to insert bottles divider within them, as well as automated ream feeding in case erector magazine to make the process totally autonomous.
Clevertech end-of-line focuses on a range of palletizers, which include machines for all kinds of needs: from palletizers with very compact robotic cells, to palletizing systems combined with product sorting that can handle as many as eight production lines simultaneously.
Clevertech’s integrated end-of-line offer includes pallet wrapping and labelling. From primary to tertiary packaging, all packaging nowadays must be labeled to ensure the safety and traceability of products throughout the supply chain. Pallet wrapping with stretch film when fully integrated into the palletizing process ensures the highest efficiency with minimum use of space and high product traceability by achieving a system with a single architecture, identical interfaces per operator and the same documentation for different manuals.
Finally, Clevertech recently created a new business unit: Leantech. This business unit concentrates on the know-how for engineering as well as producing product transport systems using different technologies such as air or magnets, used to transport lids, cans, jars, bags, and bottles, which are manipulated in the various stages of the line either as primary packaging, secondary packaging, or pallets.
THE SECTORS
Petfood
The increasing humanization of pet food, combined with the decreasing size of the animals in our households and an increase in urbanization, are some of the major forces that are driving the growth of the pet food market worldwide. Through new materials and packaging designs, food manufacturers now seek ways to convey the premium nature of their product: pouches and aluminum trays are becoming increasingly popular.
Clevertech is also present in this market with its primary (pouches, aluminum trays, cans) and secondary (cartons, trays, shrink-film packs) packaging handling technologies, which are well able to ensure the storage of products that require a quarantine period between the production line and the palletizing area.
Home Care and Personal Care
In this sector, Clevertech has gained a great deal of experience, having taken charge of major front and endof-line installation projects for several multinational companies on more than one continent. Among others, systems have been installed in Japan, the Middle East, Europe, and America. In North America, Clevertech has gone so far as to install systems for 36 lines over a period of 3 years in a single plant.
This work was carried out for a well-known multinational company in the Home & Personal Care sector where products are handled in three different business units, including dedicated liquid products for personal, home and tissue care. Recently, Clevertech has successfully developed and installed case packing projects with state-of-the-art solutions in terms of speed and axis handling, combined with a super clean machine design that facilitates maintenance and cleaning.
Food
Food is a confirmed strategic sector for Clevertech, which has collaborated with several market-leaders around the world as partners for front and end-of-line systems for packaging ketchup and mayonnaise as well as other sauces. In particular, the strong development of the confectionary sector in the U.S. has seen the company engaged in the production of unique palletizing solutions going as far as managing up to eight different product lines simultaneously, with only two palletizers and a flawless sorting system.
Can Making
Clevertech stands out for having gained extensive experience in this area. This is where it all began in 1987 and this is where, today, Clevertech is the undisputed leader in the handling of lids and cans, and metal boxes of all sizes and shapes. More specifically, over the last two years, Clevertech has rethought and developed new systems for lid transport lines that improve line efficiency with a substantial reduction in the amount of space used for the plant.
The innovation becomes even more important now that aluminum packaging is experiencing a period of special attention thanks to its recyclability. In 2023 Clevertech delivered three new plants in this area, with speeds of 3,600 cans per minute, and to the best of our knowledge, these are the fastest systems in the world!
Wine & Sprits
Clevertech has been taking its first steps in this sector since 2015, going as far as collaborating with several distilleries and wineries in the year just ended. The offer focuses on case packers as well as palletizing. In this sector, the first systems were already delivered in 2017 and the current year has seen Clevertech producing case packing systems for the biggest wineries in North America.
E-commerce
Since 2018, Clevertech has inaugurated a business unit dedicated to the world of automation in the ecommerce sector, thanks to an important collaboration with the indispute world wide leader in e-commerce. To date, the business unit involves more than 30 high specialized Engineers involved in continuous R&D joint development, placing Clevertech at the forefront of e-commerce logistics in Italy with technologies suitable for handling, tracking and sorting of different products to be managed in the e-commerce supply chain.
Interpack
Industry professionals have great expectations for this event, in its first post-pandemic edition. Clevertech will present itself with a revamped image, and live system simulations. A robotic system capable of dialogue with an AGV system will be on display at the booth: this will make it possible to demonstrate the different operations possible in a packaging line such as depalletizing, palletizing and product layer handling.
The palletization part will feature pre-forming with layer composition with Roboflex, thanks to robotic manipulators that enable the handling of cartons of different sizes, without resorting to changeover. The digitization package, applicable to any system, as well as a camera system for monitoring and assistance, will be presented at the fair. The package also includes the option to install innovative touch screens with dedicated menu displays for diagnostics, up to a specific predictive analysis package, an exclusive solution presented at Interpack.
To celebrate the upcoming edition of Interpack, after a long two-year wait, Clevertech has organized a full-day event as well as an exclusive invitation-only party on the evening of May 8. International managers and staff will be pleased to welcome customers and partners for a demonstration of the opportunities offered by Clevertech systems.
