Mike Earling (VP, Sales ) and I will be presenting a workshop on maximizing throughput at the Healthcare Packaging Conference in Princeton, NJ. We’ll be talking about how to use the theory of constraints to maximize your packaging line’s throughput and get the most out of your company’s investment. It’s on Thursday, May 26th. Click [...]

Update: I recently made some changes to this article. Most assumed that I was in favor of always slowing down to increase throughput, but it’s actually only advisable if you can increase efficiency by a significant amount (10-20%). All the changes are in the last paragraph. Can you increase efficiency and throughput by slowing down? [...]

In our previous line analysis examples we looked at a linear packaging line and another with multiple paths. Today we’re looking at a puck system. A puck system is used to move unstable products through a packaging line. They’re popular in the cosmetics and personal care industries and can be purchased from a number of [...]

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 [...]

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. I have a theory that George and [...]

Getting the best performance out of an automated packaging line is a difficult task. It is made up of a series of independent machines that each perform a different function such as filling, labeling, packing, etc. The machines are linked together by an overall control system that records the states of each machine (ie. waiting, [...]

In the 2005 Malcom Gladwell book, Blink, there is a great paragraph on marketing and packaging: there’s the issue of what is called sensation transference. This is a concept coined by one of the great figures in twentieth-century marketing, a man called Louis Cheskin, who was born in Ukraine at the turn of the century [...]