With the number of SKUs on the increase, many bottlers of water and soft drinks are calling for complete line changeovers that take minutes and not hours to turn-around. With the company’s latest InnoPET iflex system this leading Dortmund company is coming ever closer to achieving its goal.
Beverage producers today face a growing number of challenges, particularly with regard to the filling and packaging of their products. Today consumers are becoming ever-more environmentally aware and demanding ‘green’ packaging that has as little impact as possible on climate-change, whilst expecting this to be convenient, safe and inexpensive. End-users also want to be able to choose from an increasingly diverse range of beverages and packaging styles
The resulting on-going rise in item variety, means that beverage producers need to frequently change-over their production lines. This naturally affects the overall equipment efficiency (OEE) and often costs bottlers a lot of time and money – this should also seen against a background of increasing regulation and growing economic pressures. On the one hand, the beverage industry is subject to strict provisions governing the avoidance of plastic waste, the recycling of containers and secondary packaging, as well as the reduction of carbon emissions. On the other hand, it needs to boost efficiency and productivity in order to cut operating and personnel costs – ideally by using technical equipment that is easy to operate.
Modular automation concept
This is where KHS comes in with its new InnoPET iflex, a modular automation concept that was initially developed for PET lines that had
a large number of SKUs. Now with fast, reliable and reproducible changeovers, it significantly boosts OEE.
If no changes to the bottle neck, thread or label type need to be made, formats can be switched over from one SKU to another in 30 minutes – including running the system empty and starting it up again (example for non-returnable PET line with an InnoPET TriBlock stretch blow molder/labeler/filler block and two operators).
A simple product changeover can even be performed within ten minutes if required. These figures apply to outputs of up to 50,000 bottles per hour holding between 330 millilitres and 1.5 litres of still or carbonated beverage.
With the iflex option from KHS, up to 80% of all manual line conversion tasks are superfluous. Some process steps already require virtually no operator intervention at all. Full automation wouldn’t be economically viable here, meaning that some tasks are either semi-automatic, or carried out by hand as in the past. This means that KHS systems save a total of 3.5 operator hours during format changeovers all the way down the line down the line.
This is facilitated by machine options that are carefully co-ordinated with one another and whose degree of automation has been specially optimised to yield shorter changeover times. Parallel to this, supporting software solutions ensure that changeover routines are documented and can be faithfully reproduced by the operator at any given time.