Agrico Canada is a wholesale distributor of crop input products, primarily dealing with dry and liquid fertilizers. Operating within Canada, Agrico serves various agri-retail customers with premium products, both domestically and worldwide. With a location at the Hamilton Port, Agrico unloads ships carrying mass amounts of product to keep within storage domes, and afterward send to various customers across the province. Unloading these ships can be a time consuming and difficult process, with thousands of dollars of product on the line.¹
Through the years, Agrico’s product demand has increased, leading to a raise in the quantity of product shipped and frequency of shipments. With this increase in demand, it became evident that their current unloading process was dated and could use a revamp to boost their operations. With the Hamilton Port unloading ships the vast majority of the year, their equipment upgrade would have to be timed perfectly, giving the company who completes the project only a couple months to install the equipment.
Known for their high-quality custom builds and efficient installations, Advance Millwrights was the perfect fit to tackle Agrico’s operation revamp. Advance Millwright’s expert designers quickly went to work, creating a system that can keep up with the product quantity and efficiently fill the storage domes within hours. The solution was a custom fabricated stacker system complete with portable conveying, allowing the conveyor to switch between each of the five domes fed from one source. Once one dome is filled, the conveyor moves to the next dome along a track within minutes, creating minimal downtime while the ship is docked and unloading. The entire process is fully automated, reducing the amount of manual labour, decreasing unload times drastically, and eliminating the need for the ship to be moved once initially docked. The entire integration and setup was completed before the port unloading opened again, creating zero lost
time in their process.