Solutions for Flexible Product Accumulation and Packaging

No matter how much you spend on it or how well engineered it is, at some point, packaging equipment will fail.  When you’re designing or modifying a line, trying to minimize the impact of that inevitable event on the rest of the packaging and process systems can be a major challenge. The right equipment solution at the right location on the line enables effective buffering or decoupling of a failure from the rest of the line, resulting in increased yield, quality and ROI.

An example of one such piece of equipment is a product re-feeder.  This type of technology can accumulate, orient, singulate, and re-feed products (even difficult to handle or flexible packages) on a constant pitch for use by an automated secondary operation.

A Smart Solution

In our role as system integrators, we provide solutions for manufacturers’ unique needs to upgrade or integrate automation and when the solutions needed don’t exist, we turn to innovation.

In order to address clients’ manufacturing needs, we developed a plant automation solution which decouples the process and packaging systems for oddly-shaped, flexible packages such as, juice packs, granola bars, or snack chip packs.  By applying re-feeder technology to a packaging line, you can:

  • Buffer – reduce product waste through controlled accumulation and re-feed (buffering)
  • Improve operational quality – increase throughput for higher volume salable product
  • Reduce labor costs – automation in the packaging area decreases manual handling
  • Increase flexibility – automation and buffering for using assets to run multiple products

With technology that spaces, positions, counts and inserts product appropriately, re-feeding can allow you to buffer process and packaging as well as re-introduce offline product to the line, which helps with an otherwise very manual process.  All the features of a re-feeding system help the overall line performance and are a positive addition to almost any packaging line.