Scaling the Line Architecture to Industrial Volume
Yihai Kerry, one of China's largest food processing and agribusiness groups, needed a rice packaging line that could hold precision at industrial volume. In 2015, Ecronic delivered its first large-scale automated rice packaging line for the company — running at 1,000 tons a day, still one of the largest single deployments in Ecronic's history.
The Brief
By 2015, Ecronic's fully automated line architecture — proven three years earlier on the COFCO Group deployment — had only run at single-facility scale. A line built for Yihai Kerry's volume needed to hold the same precision at a throughput most packaging lines never approach: 1,000 tons of rice a day, continuously.
That's an order of magnitude beyond what a single DCS-series scale and bagger were designed to handle alone. The brief was to scale the architecture, not reinvent it.
Our Approach
We took the same line logic proven on the COFCO Group deployment — precision weighing at the core, automation engineered around it — and built it out for continuous high-volume operation, multiplying weighing and bagging stations in parallel and integrating conveying to keep pace with the line's own throughput.
Key elements of the line included:
- Multiple DCS-series weighing and bagging stations running in parallel to hold 1,000 t/day
- Continuous conveying engineered to match the line's own throughput, with no bottleneck between stages
- The same precision-first architecture proven on the 2012 COFCO Group line, scaled rather than redesigned
- A line built to run continuously, not in the batch cycles a single-station system would require
What Changed
The Yihai Kerry line proved Ecronic's automated architecture could hold precision at industrial volume, not just single-facility scale. It's the throughput benchmark every large-volume line Ecronic has quoted since gets measured against, and a direct extension of the fully-automated-line model first proven on the COFCO Group deployment in 2012.
Most importantly, it moved Ecronic from "we can automate a line" to "we can automate a line at whatever volume you run."
“1,000 tons a day isn't a bigger version of a small line — it's a different engineering problem. This is the deployment that proved we could solve it.”