Changeover Time: The Most Overlooked Metric in Liquid Packaging Performance
While business owners can discuss any number of metrics to evaluate the efficiency of packaging equipment, like speed and accuracy, one metric that is often overlooked is changeover time. Lower changeover times can greatly effect overall productivity by reducing or nearly eliminating downtime between runs of different bottles or products. Understanding and optimizing changeover times can not only improve output but also reduce labor costs as well.
What is Changeover Time?
Changeover time for any piece of packaging equipment or a complete packaging line refers to the amount of time necessary or required to switch from one product, container, cap, or other component to another. Changeover of a machine or a complete line may involve:
- Adjustments for different bottle heights or diameters
- Changes for different cap types of sizes
- Changes to fill levels or volumes
- Adjustments to conveyor guide rails
- Cleaning or rinsing procedures
Why Does Changeover Time Matter?
Even small or short delays and inefficiencies in the changeover process can add up quickly to increase downtime of the machine or line. A high-speed liquid filling machine will offer little advantage to a packager if it is sitting idle for long periods of time during the production day. And for those businesses that require frequent product changes for different liquids, flavors, colors, or other alternatives, multiple changeover delays simply eat away at productivity and efficiency. Short, quick, and easy changeover times allow manufacturers to run smaller batch sizes efficiently which in turn reduces overtime and labor strain and allows the business to respond faster to customer demand!
How Equipment Design Helps Reduce Downtime
From centralized touchscreen controls to tool-less adjustments and clean-in-place systems, Liquid Packaging Solutions designs packaging equipment with changeover efficiency in mind. Whether working with a single machine or an integrated and complete packaging line, these and other features allow for a faster, as well as a more reliable, changeover process. Tool-free or simple tool adjustments to conveyor rails, fill and rinse head positioning, machine heights, and more reduce minutes of changeover time to seconds. Simple touchscreen controls to adjust fill and rinse times, indexing, and other settings eliminate trial and error that stems from manual setup every time a change occurs. Recipe screens to recall settings for specific combinations of bottles and rinses or bottles and fills also help to reduce overall downtime. Finally, clean-in-place systems the product pathway and tanks of certain filling machines to be cleaned without any disassembly or manual tasks.
Finally, LPS offers both installation and training to help those who will be running the machine understand not only how the machine operates, but also to understand the most efficient way to change over from one bottle, product, or other component to another. The install, training and future technical support aims to ensure not only an efficient process from day one, but a process that continues to be efficient for the life of the equipment.
Changeover time is often only considered once a packager understands the effect of the process on overall productivity. Instead, it should be a metric to be measured alongside speed, flexibility, consistency, and other important factors. By investing in packaging equipment designed with changeover efficiency in mind, a business can optimize their productivity immediately instead of searching for shortcuts to reduce downtime.
To learn more about packaging machinery in general or the efficient changeover design of our equipment, contact LPS today at 1-219-393-3600.