Time is money.
Whether it is the customer with fifteen SKUs to overwrap, the one with five wrap sizes or the one that wants to wrap double stacks of some SKUs but not others, changeover on overwrapping equipment can be time consuming. Servo controls shorten the time by allowing for recipe storage and digital setting of parameters.This feature sets a servo overwrapper apart from a mechanical overwrapper. Some FA-ST overwrapper users achieve a product changeover in less than 10 minutes.
Does a plant manager measure changeover as downtime, production costs, or just lost time? No matter how you look at it, it is time and money that cannot be retrieved, so minimizing it is important.
There are overwrapping machines that take many hours to changeover and some that take minutes. For Package Machinery servo overwrappers, the time to changeover is minimal, even for a three dimensional changeover.
Much of the changeover is done by using recipes stored in the memory of the machine HMI control. Those recipes can be accessed from the screen shortening the time to make changes and remembering changes that are made each time. For a video of the changeover on an FA-ST servo overwrapper, look athttp://www.packagemachinery.com/media/fa-st-size-change/
As the clock in the video shows, a changeover can be done in as little as 10 minutes. This saves downtime on your machine.
Variations within the SKU can lengthen the time for changeover. Product changeover is minimized when the product itself is consistent, within small tolerances. This makes changeover for baked goods less consistent than for trays or or boxes with tight tolerances.
In all cases, servo controls offer the chance to reduce the downtime of changeover when compared to a mechanical overwrapper. Package Machinery has been building servo overwrappers for 10 years, longer than any other machinery manufacturer.
Contact us to discuss further.