Help! My Filler Hates My Packaging Line!

by | EPIC Systems, Inc

What do you do when the expensive new machine you bought for your packaging line refuses to cooperate? Sometimes the OEM just can’t get their product to work with your equipment. Should you give up? Hire people to hand fill your packages?

No, you shouldn’t. You should find a reputable integrator to help you get your machinery to play nice together. And where can you find such an integrator? We know a pretty EPIC one, but if you want some general guidelines for what to look for when picking out an integrator, check out our post on “How to Choose An Integrator.

How can an integrator help in this situation? Let’s take a pail filling line as an example. Each piece of machinery on your pail filling line comes from the OEM totally functional on its own. For example, your conveyor comes with the ability to be powered on and move a pail. Your filler comes with the ability to dispense liquid in doses. But separately, these pieces don’t make a functional pail filling line.

We had a client who was faced with this exact problem; their brand new filler didn’t want to cooperate with the existing line, and the OEM walked away, leaving the client with a non-functioning line. Curious how we solved that problem? Read the full pail-filling line revamp case study.

Imagine it like this: each piece of machinery is like a different colored lego. Each lego is a building block to your packaging line. You have a grand vision of what your lego’s could be, but how do you take them from individual lego’s and turn them into something awesome:

Lego Helicopterlegoart

For example, the rate at which you need to fill the pail’s does not just effect the filler. It effects the spacing of pails coming into the filler, the speed the conveyor needs to go, the rate of the lid placement, how much accumulation needs to be built into the etc. These are the types of things that help the legos come together and form a thing of beauty – a smoothly functioning filling line.

A good integrator knows the things that need to be done to take the individual pieces of your line and make them work together, both mechanically and from a controls standpoint.

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