Serving Food and Beverage packaging Industry

Serving Food & Beverage Industry

The solutions we find to the issues whose negative consequences are felt by the Others, solutions to the problems affecting Others' activities, life and interests, define who we are.

An example above, showing a small section of the packaging area inside any of the AnheuserBusch InBev™ affiliate breweries: Cerveceria Regional CA. For over twenty years, Management and Staff feel all days the power of the solutions we designed and imprinted to the tens of automated quality assurance electronic inspection systems and related conveyors, in their multiple bottling and canning manufacturing lines.

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Links to related topics: IntroductionRoot Cause Analysis (RCA) is much more than a technique of investigation of Industrial Machinery's inefficiencies or malfunctions. Part of it are the pillars of the…

Design and integration of inspection systems. Twenty years ago we entered the Food and Beverage field after years designing in a Technical Department the electronic circuits and automations of Packaging Automatic Machines.

We spent past two decades on side of the SASIB Beverage™ / SIG® / Tetra Laval -Sidel® designers and project managers of the Layout, System Engineering, Procurement and Project Management Departments:

examining Vendors’ offers,
preparating electronic inspectors Minimum Requirements,
controlling and fine-adjusting tens of new Lines’ layouts or upgrading the pre-existing,
Designing conveyors, sampling, electronic blocks, reject accumulation tables, in presence of electronic inspectors,
integrating Electronic Inspectors,
meeting Customers preferances, choosing the Inspectors’ Optoelectronic configurations optimised for their products and peculiarities;
root cause analysing tens of failed Packaging Line Layouts. To design a winning Layout does not signifies to oversize bottles’ accumulations, distances and tons of the expensive Conveyors’ stainless steel. Remember the V2 rockets which started to fall over London in 1944 ? They were single-stage rockets. What should have happened if Werner Von Braun should have continued to follow such a design-strategy for its Saturn V rocket destined to the Moon, rather than to pass to the mathematician K. E. Tsiolkovsky multi-stages concept ? Surely the first Man on the Moon should have been …Russian ! Von Braun had to think in a wider space. He understood Tsiolkovsky’s theoretical demonstrations established strict physical limits: a new design address, different than his own V2 was necessary to let the Lunar Project be some years later a successful one.

This is true also in our Food and Beverage Bottling Lines, when acting to assure success to a Layout’s design. What means ...project ? Following the Merriam Webster dictionary (an Encyclopedia Britannica Co., 2014) ethimological definition: “Middle English projecte, from Medieval Latin projectum, from Latin, neuter of projectus, past participle of proicere to throw forward, from pro-jacere to throw”.

To project something really means to imagine all what should later happen, if a very long row of design choices should be made factual. It’s like to study in what a way a tree of identified botanical variety, shall thinkably grow along future 10, 20, 30, …, 50 years, if planted there, in that season, on that ground, with that solar exposure, close to those other trees, etc. etc….. who, what, when, in what extent plus their complementary excluded amounts and categories. 25 centuries old canons of Philosophy, revived in the way to create a successful Project or to Root Cause Analyse an effect.

To assure success to a Layout first of all implies a deep and true comprehension of the Customer's fundamental desires and of the eventual criticities implicit in these desiderata.

One time this comprehension is considered complete, it is necessary to pass to the second step, how the Customer wish list can be made factual.

This is the phase where an initial temptative Layout is drawn. In this phase, it is necessary to really know:

each one Machine in the Layout. What each one Machine (or Device, like the Inspectors) needs in terms of containers accumulated before, of spaces available later, distances between containers and their maximum deviations, temperature of the containers, etc.
overall correlation between Machines, Conveyors, Services. A banal example being the vital necessity to assure Operators and Maintenance staff an adequate space to access the Machines. An operative condition perfect for a Machine 50 meters afar and before can imply an impossibility to let another operate correctly.

When summing Design activities to those of Field Service Engineering, the total number of SASIB Beverage™, SIG® and Sidel® (Tetra Laval Group®) Bottling Lines where the technical solutions designed by our staff are being applied jumps to nearly 300. Just an example visible in the different figures above, showing details of the Layout of the 60000 bottles-per-hour glass returnable Bottling Line of Yantar® Brewery at Nikolayev, Ukraine (a SABMiller® company). Here, we redesigned in 2008 positions and configurations of the Electronic Inspectors. A value added to Bottling Line masterplan: that Layout was preferred to competing offers by other OEMs and is since 2009 running and productive.

Seasoned running examples are the tens of Grupo Modelo® (an ABInbev® company) glass returnable Bottling Lines in Mexico filling the Corona® beer in the bottle visible here on right side. For these Beverage Bottling Lines our staff (in the meantime installing, system-integrating, starting and commissioning also the then fastest Linear EBI of the world in Yarpivo® at Yaroslavl, Russia, a Baltika® Group company), in Spring 2003 redesigned a new optimized Line Layout. This new Layout was made necessary when Grupo Modelo® decided to replace tens of rotary EBIs with tens of Linear EBIs.

“Project: Middle English projecte, from Medieval Latin projectum, from Latin, neuter of projectus, past participle of proicere to throw forward, from pro-jacere to throw” (Merriam Webster dictionary definition of “Project”, an Encyclopedia Britannica Co., 2014)

“False rejects’ volume, implicit in the adoption of the camera-technology, conjures to let the Risk [of sensitive beverages ingested by Consumers] be ranging (5 - 10)%, rather than the supposed <0.1%”

Graphene's staff played since 1990 on side of the Vendors' of machinery in the Technical Design and in the Field Engineering Departments. Designing before, later commissioning packaging and textile machinery, automated quality assurance electronic inspection equipment and related Conveyors. …

Field Service EngineeringGraphen is built over an experience of almost thirty years in the industry of the automatic machinery and copntrols. Last twenty serving global Food and Beverage Manufacturers and Logistics. …

Food and Beverage Packaging Line’s most productive component: youMan is the measure of all things is an idea probably originated in ancient times by the philosopher Protagoras (490-420 B.C.). And whoever living in a Food and Beverage Packaging Line knows how true Protagoras was.…

Machinery and EquipmentsHeuft SystemtechnikHEUFT InLine™ Empty Bottle InspectorCourse delivered by HEUFT staff and attended in the HEUFT factory at Burgbrohl, Germany, 5 days, advanced level

In the industrial ambients visible in the video, our staff studied and carried out nearly seventy between design and technical modifications to the original project, to:

maximise the inspection performances, an alias of the Quality final levels of the bottles and crates of beer going to the Market;
maximise mechanical efficiency, preventing and eliminating sources for production stops; typically, jams and bottles fallen during rejection or sampling;
minimise the false rejects, to levels better than Technical Guarantees the OEM provided to Grolsch®.

Processing bottles of this shape in the Packaging, is particularly challenging. Because of the irregular shape, sidewall marks and most relevant, the ceramic clip-lock. Our staff, then dressing SIG® shirts, installed all 9 Heuft®-branded electronic inspectors in the Grolsch®’s (SAB Miller® group) historic “Swing top Bottle Line”. Adding tens of design improvements to let the integration be the success Grolsch® Management still today confirms it is (image credit Jason Alden, OneRedEye)

Services

Graphene is built over twenty years of experience serving global Bottlers', satisfying their necessities of automated Quality Assurance related to electronic inspection equipment:

More, we are a highly cost effective choice existing on the worldwide scenario.

Graphene is a global supplier of Services and Technologies designed for Food and Beverage Bottling Lines, from electronic inspection for all types of packaging, to precise and quantitative Risk Assessments for contaminations and injuries to final Customers, until Root Cause Analysis for Bottling Lines and Machines’ inefficiencies or Quality pitfalls. A reliable partner for Food and Beverage businesses around the world, Graphene applies its proprietary technologies to pursuit innovation of the automated Quality Control and Assurance processes. We are firmly convinced that all Food and Beverage Bottling Companies in the world merit to reach their desired top performances.

Performances we delivered to Grolsch®, Heineken®, PepsiCo® and Coca-Cola® North America. Without any extracost for the Bottler, really it is possible to maximise Quality, reducing in the meantime the associated losses on Production, commonly arising by production stops and automated QA inspection systems' false positives. These last being any of the greatest obstacles to the alignement of Companies' policies on product's Quality with what really gets out of the Bottling Lines, reaching final Customers.

Graphene does not…

We are focused on the activities where we excel: continuous improvement, reliability and quality for the Manufacturing & Logistic industry.

Graphene does not:

produce or sell electronic inspection systems, or their parts;
sell or resell Third Parties’ electronic inspection systems, or their parts.

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Developers’ PortalLinks to the pages: Food and Beverage safety, Quality and Production challenges are fronted, on a daily base wherever in the World, by: Factory Managers; Bottling Managers;…

Serving Food & Beverage IndustryThe solutions we find to the issues whose negative consequences are felt by the Others, solutions to the problems affecting Others' activities, life and interests, define who we are. …

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Links to the pages: About UsGraphene® is built over twenty nine years of experience serving the global Packaging industry. The last twenty of them on side of the worldwide Food and Beverage Bottling Companies, satisfying their necessities of Quality related to Beverage Bottling Machinery and Electronic Inspectors:…

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