Packaging & Converting
Product packaging plays an essential role in the sales food chain, protecting the contents, providing consumer instructions, and attracting the purchaser to pick the product up and buy it in the first place.
Machine automation helps in preserving product quality and moving the product from factory to store shelves as quickly as possible. Product quality is not the only quality that matters. If a box is torn, the can dented, or even if a label is crooked, a customer may be less likely to purchase the contents. This places as much responsibility for the sale on the packaging and converting machine builders as on the manufacturers of the products.
Industry Challenge
The process of putting a bottle into a carton consists of a complex sequence of highly synchronized steps. The tolerances are exacting and the whole operation needs to take place at very high speeds. For major operations with top-of-the-line automatic packaging and converting machines, throughput of 300 parts per minute is not unusual; on some candy packaging lines, air-blown form, fill, and seal equipment can package as many as 1000 parts per minute. Whether the product being packaged is diet soda or diapers, throughput is essential to profitability. Key factors include not just speed of operation but minimizing unscheduled downtime and speeding changeovers and maintenance.
The Motion Solutions Advantage
At Motion Solutions, we represent premium brands of motion control and machine automation components. Our supplier partners manufacture quality equipment for high-speed operation running automatic converting and packaging machines. We are very motion-centric as a company. Although machine builders are experienced in the design of automated systems, they frequently turn to us for incremental improvements in automation components that can give their equipment the edge. We can assist customers by building subsystems and assemblies for them, or by working through thorny design problems to boost the speed of their line by just a fraction.
Proven Solutions
We’ve helped develop automatic converting equipment for labelers that handle everything from bottles to detergent jugs to sachets for condiments like ketchup and mustard. We specialize in motion designs for a variety of sizes, weights, and form factors. The label may be incidental to the performance of a product, but it remains the first part of the product that the customer sees. The labeling equipment needs to apply the label in the correct position, without damaging it, and it needs to do so at very high speed.
Packaging and converting equipment also need to be cost effective. Manufacturers have to spend money on washdown motors for processing and packaging. They want their labelers to be as economical as possible. Motion Solutions excels at cost-down engineering of machine automation components. We leverage our position as a distributor to find the most cost-efficient parts for the job, modify parts to streamline test and assembly, and, if necessary, redesign the automatic packaging assembly entirely to wind up with a system that meets all customer specifications at a lower overall price.
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