Page 26 - BusinessWest September 1, 2025

TECHNOLOGY >>
Armed with
Automation
A robotic palletizer
tackles a load of boxes.
Elm Electrical Advances
in the Realm of Robotics
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
But machines don’t seem to mind.
No one likes loading boxes onto a pallet.
Mike Holmberg noted as much as
he pointed to a neatly palletized pile of
boxes from a liquor distributor. In a non-
automated facility, he said, someone would be load-
ing those by hand.
“They’re making the different spirits, and then
they put them in a bottle, put the bottle inside a
case, then the case comes down a conveyor, and
some person is picking up each one of these, and
they’re stacking it in this stack, all day long. It’s not
a fun job,” said Holmberg, senior vice president at
Elm Electrical in Westfield.
“So we developed a solution for a robotic pal-
letizer,” he said, pointing to the robotic arm and
related equipment on Elm’s engineering floor. “It
will now take the box as it’s coming off the conveyor,
pick it up, and build this pallet. That’s called robotic
palletizing.
“It’s a huge labor saver. And it’s about safety, too.
It’s backbreaking. And it’s also work that people
don’t want, so they don’t last. And in today’s day and
age, it’s hard to find employees,” he went on. “Cus-
tomers, manufacturers in particular, are having dif-
ficulty keeping those kinds of jobs filled. You’ve got
to train them, they have to go through all the safety
protocols, and then they come in and work for a few
days and go, ‘hey, I don’t want to do this,’ and they’re
out of here. Now you have to start over.”
On this recent afternoon, Holmberg led Busi-
nessWest on a tour of the floor where it builds, pro-
“We essentially procure
robotic arms from them, and
then we integrate them. We
do the programming, and we
come up with the end-of-arm
tool, which is like the robot’s
hand. We develop that
solution, and then we teach
the robot to do whatever
task it needs to do.”
26 << TECHNOLOGY >>
SEPTEMBER 1, 2025
Business W est