Laying Out Equipment (CONT’D FROM PAGE 18)
As part of your planning, be sure to lay out utilities: elec- tricity, data cabling, compressed air, warm and cold water, ink, and adhesive. As noted above, your infrastructure may need to be upgraded; however, even if it’s adequate, space will likely be required at your converting machine for, among other things, an electrical load center, isolation transformer, and workstations. Now that your design is complete, it’s time to start plan- ning the installation. Determine the phasing of the project based on budget and required sequence. Include reloca- tion of machinery if need be. Tools such as Microsoft Proj- ect are useful in this regard. Consider critical path tasks and allocate realistic, but not excessive, time for each. Try to plan for contingencies, but be ready to deal with the inevitable unexpected problems; even the best planning cannot foresee your ship being delayed by a hurricane or unexpected border closures.
do this without impacting your run speed or generating feed interrupts? If you intend to install automatic inserters now or in the future, be sure to provide additional space at the discharge. Be sure your machine discharge convey- or length is sufficient. Is your mainline conveyor adequate for the additional volume, or will it become a bottleneck? Sometimes congestion can be alleviated by adding paral- lel conveyors. If right angle transfer times become limiting factors, consider devices with shorter travel time such as flat belt or chain types, or even faster ball belts. Even with a long mainline, bottlenecks can occur at your unitizers. Can your unitizers keep up with the added production? Perhaps you need additional heads, a sec- ond stage, a faster machine, or even an additional unitizer, which will probably require more floor space. But even if unitizer capacity is adequate, consider the ability to load the strapped material or place it into finished goods inven- tory at the same rate as the unitizer. Are there sufficient lift trucks and truck docks? If you ship on pallets and insert them as material is loaded, do you have space for effi- cient handling of the pallets themselves? If you are adding production capacity and you store a significant amount of finished goods, do you have enough space? There is no point in running your equipment at design speeds, only to shut down when the main line backs up due to any of these factors.
Richard Etra is a 47-year veteran of the corrugated industry with exten- sive experience in all aspects of box plant operations. He was a principal of Star Corrugated Box Company, and subsequently Manager of Spe- cial Projects and Technology at Cas- cades Containerboard Packaging.
Richard Etra
He is currently the principal of Etra Corrugated Solutions, LLC and can be reached at richard_etra@etracorrugated- solutions.com.
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20 February 21, 2022
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