Conveyor Blog

Practical Winery and Vineyard’s latest cover story has a great shot of the huge wine barrels made by Oak Cooperage.

Practical Winery and Vineyard

We have installed many of our Infinity tables in the wine industry in California and Australia. They raise throughput by protecting fillers from downtime on labelers and casepackers.

QC Industries beat me to it this morning, but it’s not too often that the word “Conveyor” is in a network TV show. Something tells me it may not be around for very long. Check out ABC’s Conveyor Belt of Love:

Yes, really. ABC is airing a show called “Conveyor Belt of Love” on Jan. 4, right after the premiere of “The Bachelor.”

And if you’re wondering what a show called “Conveyor Belt of Love” would entail, well, the title succinctly and depressingly pretty well says it all. From the network’s press release: “One by one … 30 men are presented on the ‘Conveyor Belt of Love’ to … five women and given 60 seconds to impress them. If a woman is interested in someone, that man will step aside and wait as the rest of the men go by.”

This isn’t the first or the last time conveyors play a role in mainstream culture. James Bond always seems to be fighting a bad guy on one and of course, everyone remembers the classic episode of I Love Lucy.

We’ve been posting some more videos on YouTube lately as an alternative to the ones here on our website. Here’s a great one we just posted of our Infinity Rx vial accumulation table.

It shows how we can take very unstable pharmaceutical vials and single file them to feed a filler, labeler, or inspection machine.

Alan over at the Sustainability in Packaging blog made a great post about how to evaluate the True Cost of Cheap Equipment:

The seemingly lower purchase price, although deceptive, is not malicious in nature. The omission of regulatory compliance or the absence of IOQ document costs stem mostly from where the vendor stands on the evolutionary timescale vis à vie the market they are entering. The onus therefore is on the buyer to encompass non-trivial costs in their analysis—costs which exceed the mere functioning of the machine.

Beware of hidden costs

One simple way to evaluate how high your total cost of ownership will be for a machine is to ask the vendor what percentage of his business is in spare parts.

I love little examples from every day life that show good or bad design that can be related back to well designed machinery. On the machinedesign.com blog, Leslie Gordon gives a great example of poorly thought out usability in an elevator alert light. It’s supposed to show which elevator is about to open, but because of the column, you can see the light.

We can't see the light behind the column

This happens when designers and engineers work inside of a bubble. They worked on a perfectly useful feature that is rendered less useful in the context of the structure around it. This happens all the time in our industry where a typical automated packaging line consists of machines designed by many different vendors. How can we make sure our features are still useful in the context of where they’ll be installed? What are some good design practices to use to achieve this?

Over at On the Edge, Keith Campbell makes the case for packaging machines to become All Remembering:

Consider that $200 will presently buy you enough memory to store everything that you would ever read, everything that you would ever hear, and 10 photos per day for an entire lifetime. But, if we are on the cusp of such a breakthrough for people, consider how much easier it would be for machines. Without spending too much extra, we could know every position, bump, temperature, humidity, voltage, speed, reject, operator, maintenance procedure, … your get the idea ….., ever seen by the machine. If our machines had total recall, could we design them better? Could we maintain them better? Could we operate them better? I think we could.

What would it be like it machines had Total Recall?

On the consumer side, those cheap 1TB+ drives are great, but you’ll need more storage than that. 10 photos a day is great at your current camera’s resolution, but not tomorrow’s. HD Video takes up a tremendous amount of space, but the drives are keeping up.

But that’s a side note on his overall excellent point that there have been great advances in data collection and data search. Here are some examples of that:

I used to sort my inbox by project or event, but now I dump everything into a giant folder and search for what I need. It searches incredibly fast through thousands and thousands of emails and I find things much easier than if I “organized” them.

I have thousands and thousands of songs on my iPod and iTunes profile. I used to rate them and build playlists from the ratings, but I couldn’t keep up. It took too long to rate every song I added, so now I let Apple run through that data against other peoples’ playlists and it builds playlists for me based on a selection of a single song I like. (This is called Genius in iTunes).

So where does that leave machines? I think the first part (data collection) is already being done in many ways. Companies have mountains of data for their overall production, line downtimes, average machine speeds, amperage readings, etc., but it’s almost like knowing your blood pressure number, but not knowing whether that’s good or bad. Packagers can say with absolute certainty how they are performing on the current shift, but they can’t predict next week’s and that’s where this data will be useful: Finding and correcting problems before they occur. Ways of searching and making sense of that data need to get better before that can happen.

Part of the reason why this hasn’t happened yet is that as far as we’ve come, the computer revolution hasn’t come to packaging machinery yet. It’s better, but I have more computing power in my phone than most of the standard PLCs on the market… and guess which one costs more.

One question we get asked a lot is, “How much accumulation do I need?”

Accumulation time is proportional to the Mean Time to Repair of the other machines.

A typical packaging line is made up of a series of operations (filling, labeling, packing, etc.) and only one operation can be the constraint, or bottleneck. The constraint dictates the pace of the entire line and most lines are designed with the filler as the constraint. If so, your goal should be to never let downtime on the other machines cause the constraint to shut down. Therefore, your accumulation should be enough time to cover the downtime of any non-constraint machine on the line. If your packer takes 5 minutes to repair (Mean Time to Repair, MTR) and your labeler takes 3 minutes to repair, then you need 5 minutes of accumulation between the labeler and the filler.

To get a little more in depth…

If you’re upstream from the constraint, your accumulation only needs to handle the highest MTR upstream from the constraint.

If you’re downstream from the constraint, your accumulation only needs to handle the highest MTR downstream from the constraint.

For example:

A typical mass flow or bi-directional table puts tremendous pressure on bottles. How do you prove that your accumulation table has no backpressure? Put a raw egg on the conveyor with a few rows of filled wine bottles and see what happens.

Starring Lord William Chatterton III:

The products stay in continuous motion because of our loop accumulation system, relieving all backpressure between the bottles. This allows us to handle extremely unstable bottles, such as tapered wine bottles, but it also prevents product damage. If this egg is ok, the bottle labels will be fine, too.

One of my daughter’s favorite stories is Curious George Goes to a Chocolate Factory, a story where George’s curiosity ends up creating havoc on the packaging line. Everything works out ok in the end, but the best part is when George actually becomes the Casepacker for the line.

George turned the packaging line up to Extra Fast

The newest casepacker model from Douglas Machine or Standard Knapp?

I have a theory that George and the Man with the Yellow Hat have a Fight Club type of relationship. It would explain a lot.

The Packaging Diva takes a strong stance against wrap-rage and overreacting to wasteful packaging.

I’m not going to expound in depth on all the “real” things packaging does, but think of the primary responsibilities of the package. On the “short” list: It protects, conveys or transports the product so that it arrives undamaged or unbroken. It educates or tells us what is inside and what to do with it. It sells or persuades us to buy what’s inside. It makes it easy for us to buy, use or consume it.

WrapRage is now the “in” buzz word from now to after Christmas. How hard it is too open or how dangerous it is when you do. But, seriously think through your day from the time you get up to your last bedtime snack. How many of those things could you use, do or accomplish without packaging?

Happy Thanksgiving!

I think many of the wrap-rage concerns are valid for difficult to open packages, specifically in electronics, but packaging is the only way I know of to deliver goods efficiently to billions of people. Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!