By Don Button
Technical Director, Tray Packer Team

In order to reduce the bulk of palletized loads, reduce the unit cost of shrink wrapped trays and improve the appearance of product displays on dealer shelves, Standard-Knapp has developed a chipboard version of the Model 296I Continuum high-speed tray/shrink system. This machine collates loose or bundled products into individual slugs, wraps a tray around each slug and shrink wraps the assembled trays. When designing this chipboard version of the Continuum, we wanted to make improvements, wherever possible, to the durability, reliability and ease-of-maintenance of the existing 296I.

By John LaSpada
Supervisor of Technical Documentation

Standard-Knapp realizes that the luxury of producing machinery for dedicated lines is a thing of the past. This is why one of the top focuses of our new machine designs is the idea of making changeover faster, easier and repeatable, without tweaking. Standard-Knapp first recognized that changeover was going to be a high priority back in 1986, with the development of our first generation Spectrum continuous motion tray packer. Initially, the reception was uncertain. "In those days, simply having changeover on a continuous motion machine was an accomplishment in itself," said Art Tanner, President of Standard-Knapp. Times have changed so much that not only do customers want a machine with changeover capability, but they also want the changeover fast, easy and repeatable.

Next, these ideas had to be applied to the beginning stages of the machinery design, which meant standardizing the engineers' method of thinking with respect to changeover. "The technology that we use is not terribly sophisticated," said Tanner. "The challenge, as far as changeover is concerned, is to think your way through a variety of ways to do something and find one that is easy-to-use, easy-to-document and satisfies the needs of the customer, the assembler and the engineer.

The Team
After deciding what steps needed to be taken to ensure a consistent changeover design in all of our machines, Standard-Knapp decided to form a team to help in the process. Founded in the fall of 1998, the Standard Changeover Team was developed to analyze how Standard-Knapp machines perform, with respect to changeover, and how they can be improved to exceed our customers' expectations.

Over the 18-month tenure of the Standard Changeover Team, the following improvements were accomplished:

The Results
The results of Standard-Knapp's dedication to changeover can be viewed at the very infancy of our new machine designs. Nick Pini, Senior Design Engineer and member of the Standard Changeover Team, said the impact is very clear.

"We have to keep changeover in mind at all times," he said. "In each of our projects, we establish the changeover goal as the first priority. If we set the goal as 15 minutes, and we have 15 changeover points, then each changeover point is designed to take no longer than one minute to complete the change. We design changeover into each part of our machinery." The most evident signs of Standard-Knapp's new faster, easier, and repeatable changeover are displayed in all of our new machinery (see chart at beginning of story).

By Peter Burton
Senior Product Designer

Why did Standard-Knapp decide to expand the capabilities of the Orbitron?
As our customers demanded that greater varieties of products be run on the Orbitron, it became apparent that the existing Johnson Wheel concept could not be expanded to meet these needs and still remain reliable. Multi-packs, merchandiser cases, tall bottles, non-carbonated PET bottles, aluminum cans, and glass bottles of various shapes were better handled with either an overhead flight bar system or a Raudatiller assembly.

Originally, for what packaging purpose was the Orbitron designed for?
The Orbitron was originally meant to run 20 oz. PET bottles into 1/2-depth corrugated trays. Due to the flexibility of the continuous motion concept, Standard-Knapp was continually asked to expand the range of the machine to meet customer needs. During this process, it was discovered that many product configurations could not be adequately handled by the wheel.

What changes were made to expand the Orbitron's capabilities?
The overhead flight bar system and Raudatiller were both developed to handle different configurations.

What types of customers (and products) have you attracted with the Orbitron's new design?
Some examples are:

Both Coca-Cola and Pepsi are driving the change toward merchandiser trays, which are tighter and more closely supportive of the bottles. The tight fit and larger space between the bottles and the ends of the plastic trays necessitated the move toward the overhead flight bar system.

What are the future plans for this product line?
Using the experience gathered during recent installations of these machines, Standard-Knapp is working toward increasing serviceability and especially ease-of-changeover, as we recognize the need for many of our customers to be able to use one machine to handle an increasingly large variety of products.