Bottle up your profits

When asked to identify six key principles required for assembling cost-effective bottling lines, Matt Thewlis, factory manager at the Widford, Chelmsford site of Britvic, one of the two leading soft drinks manufacturers in Great Britain, gave a thorough reply.

"Each piece of equipment must meet a high individual operational efficiency – actual output versus theoretical output – both to maximise output and minimise intervention requirements by operators," he says. "The system must also be integrated in such a way as to deliver an optimal overall system efficiency.

"Losses of prime materials or rejects from the line must be minimised in the design stage. With high throughput even small improvements in yield rates can make a significant impact in financial terms. This particularly impacts purging systems for product, CIP systems and other processing requirements.

"Energy efficiency and the efficient use of services like water are increasingly important as utility costs increase and the task of continuing to reduce the environmental impacts of manufacturing needs to be addressed.

"Line utilisation is important in maximising productive time from the investment made. This is affected by the length of time the line can be operated in a hygienic way between cleans, the minimisation of time to clean and sterilise the plant, the minimisation of time to change between packaging types that are being run and the optimisation of preventative maintenance time", he continued.

"Future proofing of the line ensures that it will have future capability against as yet unknown requirements. This is a measure of the versatility of the plant in the longer term to run different packaging configurations and product types. This is a consideration at both the system and individual machine level and is of increasing importance as product life cycles reduce and demand for new product increases.

"Finally, the capital cost must be optimised. Each decision on the line reflects a value judgement of the future benefit against the investment."

Equally important are the views of a supplier, especially if that supplier works hand in glove with the customer, Britvic, so the same question was put to John Parkes, director of quality at Rockware Glass. His answer was more to the point but just as helpful. "Consider the number of products which the line will process. This will have a considerable effect on line efficiency. Also have a clear understanding of the incoming stock storage availability, as failure to understand this can result in line stoppages", he said.

"Make sure the incoming pack designs and pallet handling systems meet line throughput requirements and do you need an EBI [empty bottle inspector]? This is essential if bottle quality is poor as rejects can be as high as 1%.

Parkes concluded by saying that the line should be designed "to minimise impact on bottles to minimise breakage, as breakage can cause significant downtime", and to "ensure labelling and packing systems match customers current and future requirements."

Some similar points then and some differences of emphasis, so are there benefits to be gained by bottle manufacturer, machinery supplier and packer/filler planning independent bottle lines and plants in harmony? Both Parkes and Thewlin agree on this one. "Integrating within the supply chain from material supplier to end of production enables optimisation of processes to meet some of the key demands," says Thewlin. "It also helps in bringing new ideas to organisations, recognising the different skills and knowledge base that exist.

"There is no substitute for robust, well-engineered and supported equipment," adds Parkes. "Ensure your equipment supplier is not just a supplier of equipment but offers detailed training for line operatives and out-of-hours call out support during commissioning and day to day running. Cheap, poorly engineered and supported equipment will prove more costly in the end."

The secret to success of any project

Users should obviously strip out unnecessary costs at the installation stage. Plan carefully advises Thewlin, stating that the secret to success of any project is to have agreed, as far as is practicable, all activities and a clear view of what will happen before it does. Design simulation systems can also help to significantly reduce unnecessary costs, added Parkes, who advice was to look for suppliers who offer this as part of the design service.

Of course, advancing technology is bound to affect attitudes. The biggest changes in the past decade have occurred in control and electronics on the line – the ability to capture information on how the process is operating, to operate independent synchronised drives, and to communicate between different parts of the plant are all individual examples.

The hygiene requirements of plant have also grown in importance as products have become more sophisticated and less robust in nature. This extends to both the process design and the mechanical design of equipment to aid cleaning. And finally, filling speeds have increased from 100/bpm, to over 2000/bpm.

What changes are we likely to see in the future? Matt Thewlin says their will be an ever increasing emphasis on efficiency of operation and energy, on adaptability to future requirements including modularisation, on improving processing hygiene and in handling the product ever more "gently".

John Parkes believes the industry will see developments such as ink jet labelling replacing paper and plastic labels. He also says there will be an increase in the introduction of more robots such as automatic de-strappers.

"Is simplicity the rule of thumb to adopt for a problem-free installation, particularly in a world where electronics and robotics rule?" he asks. "Simplicity is a misused term. People seem to say simplicity when they actually mean flexibility. For example, if a user wants a line that will be problem free then the best way is to only process one product with one label, one cap and one pack.

"However, when a user has multiple products requiring short runs, the simplest approach is to have two, three or four slow [100bpm] short lines with hand or semi-automatic depalletisers, simple filler/cappers [4-8 head], simple labellers [4-8 head] and contract labour hand packing. This may seem crazy, but job changes are much simpler and users can maximise the use of their labour."

Putting theory into practice is much more difficult. With 14 breweries, the Efes Beverage Group numbers among the 10 largest brewery groups in Europe. Five breweries today belong to the Efes Beverage Group in Turkey where a new KHS line has recently been installed at the Ankara site. The turnkey glass bottling line manages both the filling and packaging of non-refillable and refillable glass bottles with an output of 50,000 0.5-litre or 0.33-litre glass bottles/hr and has been compactly implemented on a given area of 2500m2.

An Innopal RS 3 column-type robot depalletises the crates of refillable bottles as they are presented, with a clamping head removing the containers gently from the pallets. Like the whole of the dry area, the RS 3 is designed using the KHS dry area modular concept, a major advantage of which is the use of a PC-based robot control that uses a single central intelligence. This intelligence not only co-ordinates the servo-axes, but also controls the peripheral components and provides facilities for machine visualisation on VGA monitors.

Toothed belt drives are used to produce horizontal and vertical movements of the modular dry area, which means less servicing effort in addition to decreased noise levels. Servomotors shorten cycle times and ensure high performance coupled with positioning accuracy.

Efes chose the computer controlled Innofill DRS-ZMS pneumatic pressure filling system which boasts a low-oxygen filling process and is designed to process new sizes and shapes of bottle up to 1-litre.

A crown cork capper is used and for labelling, an Innoket KL 2080, equipped with two stations to label the body, shoulder and back, was selected. The size of the pitch circle will enable two additional Innoket APL tandem self-adhesive labelling stations to be added in the future. This will allow Efes to carry out self-adhesive labelling using paper labels, as well as self-adhesive labelling with foil labels.

Multi-position robotic palletiser

The sensitive non-refillable packs are conveyed gently on slat-belt, chain accumulation conveyors made from wear-resistant plastic directly to the Innopal RS 3 palletiser. A feature of this multi-position column-type robot is the automatic gripper head, which can be changed so that it is suited for palletising both refillable and non-refillable packs. Whereas the hook gripper head is used for palletising crates, the roller carpet version of the head is used for packing non-refillable goods. Only a few minutes are required for the automatic packing head changeover.

Installed this year at the Modelo Mexico Brewery was yet another Robopac Sistemi Genesis end-of-line pallet wrapping machine, distributed in the UK by Aetna. More than 60 machines have now been installed at the Modelo Mexican Brewery.

Modelo's primary need was to significantly increase production speeds and, at the same time, reduce production costs. Its existing rotating ring wrapping machines were costing increasingly more to maintain and were only achieving 90% efficiency and the company set out to find a manufacturer of high-speed pallet stretch wrappers which would be able to guarantee production peaks of 100 pallets/hr with 99% efficiency while reducing overall operating and maintenance costs.

The Robopac Sistemi Genesis's rotating ring function, without slip rings, meant that machine maintenance costs were lower and safety implications were also reduced. The most recent machines are also fitted with the Mod. ARC/3 automatic film reel change system, reputed to further boost the machine's productivity and efficiency.

Meanwhile, Europe's largest brewery has made savings after installing Secomak's latest drying unit on its only bottling line. Scottish Courage's Berkshire Brewery processes an average of 750 000 bottles every day and it is using the combination dryer to ensure bottles are dried thoroughly prior to being labelled, thus reducing the incidence of skewing during label application.

The dryer incorporates both compressed and blower generated air, making it suitable for bottling lines where under crown drying needs to be incorporated with whole bottle drying at high speeds. It has also been designed to reduce the amount of time it takes to change from one size to another. "The new system is much less expensive and easier to maintain than our previous system, which involved the temporary installation of pneumatic hoses," says the Berkshire Brewery's project manager Paul Kime.