Link Between New Packaging Machinery Technology & Increased Output
January 9, 2017
If you've been listening to the latest news about packing and product handling industries, you've probably heard something about the use of newer and more sophisticated machines to improve capacity and boost production. But how does this work?
Some of today's top companies have been able to improve their capacity and do more on a daily basis by replacing older machines with newer packaging machine technology and automated equipment. Here are some ways that this kind of innovation works for a packaging enterprise.
A New Kind of Machine Interface
When you think about new technology for packaging production, you might just think about the moving parts of machines. But there's also the interface that the human operator uses, and this is a big deal when it comes to effectively improving operations with new machinery.
In the industry, we talk about the “HMI” or “human machine interface” -- the interface that the machine operator uses to operate the machine.
Older interfaces are often made up of visual or physical control buttons without a lot of context. They aren’t very sophisticated. They can provide controls for things like “stop” and “go,” but they can’t provide a lot of visual context for automation.
New interfaces are designed to be intuitive. They offer a lot more visibility for the human operator, and that means your workers can direct the machines to work in much more customized and specialized ways. This can increase production, as well as make line processes more agile, so that you are able to change over to different product lines with less downtime.
New Centering and Alignment Technologies
Then there are the physical processes that these new machines offer. For example, your older “legacy” machine might take a specific quantity of materials and put them into a physical container in a single, consistent way. But what if you need to adjust or calibrate the products being handled?
Modern machines offer things like auto film tracking and automatic centering of films. They offer more versatile ways to package a product, with more attention to the precise shapes and sizes of bags and containers. This helps to refine the process and make it more efficient. It helps with troubleshooting and generally, it means that you'll have less downtime and more damage control as you move forward.
Machine Maintenance
Another way that new packaging machines boost productivity is by their very design. These new machines are being built with longevity and reliability in mind.
Older machines are going to break down. They will require more parts maintenance, and that means more times when the line has to be stopped to accommodate maintenance and care. This time is extremely valuable to a busy packaging company. With new machines, the time and effort required to do repairs on older systems won't eat into the bottom line -- instead, there is a greater margin of uptime to facilitate larger volumes of production in a given week or month.
Think about these critical ways that new machines help companies to make progress in what they do each day.
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