THE supply of a new shrink wrapping line is reported to have doubled the packing capacity for one of the largest corrugate board manufacturing plants in the UK, freeing up a bottleneck in the production facility.
The company was so impressed that the same machinery was rolled out across all five of the company’s UK manufacturing sites.
The shrink wrapping process had become a bottleneck at the end of the die cutting line in production. The existing lines, supplied by Yorkshire Packaging Systems (YPS), had been there for over 10 years, and although they had performed as expected, the installation of a new die cutting line meant higher output rates would be required.
The structured factory environment provided an additional challenge as the new equipment had to be manoeuvred into position around a tight production facility without disruption, and installed into a very small footprint, no larger than that occupied by the previous line.
A Mimi Uniblock 1123 sleeve wrapper, with double chamber shrink tunnel, was recommended and supplied by YPS. The sleeve wrapper is 1.1m in width and can ‘comfortably’ process products at the larger end of the manufacturer’s range.
The new sleeve wrapper offers a double chamber tunnel with Uniblock design, which rather than using a traditional outfeed conveyor, utilises the tunnel section as the outfeed. This means the tunnel is twice as long without any compromise on total line length.
YPS said the shrink line can now process 14-16 packs per minute, whereas the previous line could only run at 6-8 ppm. The install was achieved in just a day-and-a-half, including decommissioning the current line and inserting, commissioning and running tests on the new line over a weekend.
Following the first install, a further five machines were purchased from YPS so that all UK facilities in the group could benefit from the increased output.
