YPS: Production bottleneck freed up with fast shrink wrap line

The supply of a new shrink wrapping line doubled the packing capacity for one of the largest corrugate board manufacturing plants in the UK, freeing up a bottleneck in their production facility. The company was so impressed that the same state of the art shrink wrapping machinery was rolled out across all 5 of their 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 that higher output rates would need to be met.

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.

Having discussed their requirements, including necessary throughput, with the YPS team, 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 therefore 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.

The shrink line can now process 14-16 packs per minute, freeing up the facility to run at optimum speed across all processes. The previous line could only run at 6-8 ppm.

The difficult install was achieved by the YPS engineering team in just a day and a half, keeping production disruption to a minimum. This included decommissioning the current line and inserting, commissioning and running tests on the new line over a weekend to be ready to go Monday morning for live production.

The board manufacturer’s Operations Manager was highly impressed with YPS’ service: YPS make it very easy to deal with them. The whole package is taken care of – as well as the machine that we needed, they supply high quality film and deliver an excellent ongoing service and support package. Their added film knowledge and recycled content options give us a unique offering in a very competitive market.

Following the first install, a further 5 machines were purchased from YPS so that all of the UK facilities in the Group could benefit from the increased output they deliver.