Consumer Product Assembly & Packaging - Bottle Orientor

DMW Automation engineers and staff personnel designed and built custom bottle orienting equipment that significantly improved production while providing quick product switching capabilities thus reducing downtime.

Overview
Situation
Action
Results

Overview

Location: Midwest
Industry: Consumer Product
Products/Services: Household Product
Primary SIC Code: 5169
Annual Sales: Over $1 billion
Technology: Continuous Motion

Bottle orientation verification.

Situation

DMW Automation was contacted by a major consumer products manufacturer to provide a solution for a problem they were having with orienting bottles with offset necks or handles, pre-decorated and/or with unique orienting features, prior to conveying them to the downstream processing equipment.

Their existing automated bottle orienting systems was not easy to changeover and it allowed improperly oriented bottles to enter the downstream labeling and filling equipment, causing jams in the equipment and loss of production.

The customer approached DMW Automation since they had worked with us previously on their labeling equipment. They provided us with a specification for orienting equipment that could handle 300 parts per minute.

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Action

DMW Automation personnel traveled to the customer’s location to evaluate and examine their existing equipment and discuss the problems they were experiencing and their new equipment objectives.

Our engineers used an existing DMW Automation patented labeling machine platform, already being used in production at the customer’s facility, and integrated an orienting feature into it. The solution we provided was a high speed, Continuous Motion rotary machine capable of speeds in excess of 300 parts per minute. Bottles entered the Bottle Orientor in a random 180 degree orientation and were placed onto an individual rotating platform where a machine vision system determined whether the bottle was correctly oriented. Our designed equipment rotated improperly oriented bottles 180 degrees while allowing properly oriented bottles to continue. A second vision system inspected all bottles exiting the machine to ensure they were in the proper orientation.

After fabrication and assembly, we conducted Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT) with the customer present and received their approval to ship the machine. We shipped the machine on site and integrated it with the upstream and downstream equipment.

This engineered solution can handle:

Bottles with a handle
Off-set neck bottles
Pre-decorated bottles, and
Bottles with an identifying feature

Results

Our automated equipment solution resulted in a 25-30% increase in total line efficiency which ultimately resulted in multiple DMW Automation systems being built and installed on various packaging lines for this customer.

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For more information about DMW Automation’s custom automation equipment and systems services, please call us at 847-437-0665 or email us at sales@dmwautomation.com.