‘Can’ We Fix It? Yes We Can! An Adjustable Guiderail Solution for a Packaging Manufacturer
Case Studies
We introduced an adjustable guiderail to bring about amazing process improvements for a can manufacturer. See how we went from problem… to solution.
Guiding cans was not going smoothly
When one of our customers, who produces cans, wanted a better solution for their manufacturing conveyor – they came to us. The customer was using ‘lock in’ guides which were not effective in steering empty cans around bends and conveyor transfers. Whenever they needed to switch between producing different sized products they faced lengthy downtime.
To widen or narrow their conveyor guide sets between batch runs involved a complicated manual fitting of a whole new set of guides onto conveyor mounting dowels. Not only did this take ages, there was also plenty of scope for error – with the customer experiencing unplanned expansions and contractions and problems when cans accumulated against the guides.
There was also the issue of storing four complete colour coded guide sets.
A solution in partnership with Zepf Technologies
We worked with Zepf Technologies to develop a new double rail adjustable guide set that would replace the existing system. The adjustable guiderail solution specifically supported 90-degree bends, conveyor transfer points and included special can accumulation areas.
The new system had four integrated adjustable colour coded positions which catered for the wide range of can diameters being handled on the line. No tools were required to change the guide positions, just a simple repeatable process that automatically dropped rail sections onto the correct set of pins. A changeover between batch runs now took only a few seconds, meaning virtually no lost time.
Process improvements are our speciality
The process improvement we witnessed this procest create was awesome. Contact us if you would like some help with your processes.
