Your automation partner in packaging
If you manufacture packaging machines and want to increase your profitability, then we can help: with a complete range of services and products designed to increase your machine’s speed, versatility, performance and safety.
Although some of these packaging machine solutions are highly advanced, they are also proven to be extremely reliable, to maximise your customers’ loyalty.
Use our knowledge as a specialist automation partner to develop a new machine or upgrade an existing model.
Your speciality – our specific expertise
Are you a specialist in bottling? Or perhaps you focus on snack foods? Do you manufacture primary packaging machines or do you offer secondary and final packaging machines as well? Whatever your speciality, we can discuss with you about increasing your profitability in packaging in any of the following sectors:
- Bakery & biscuits
- Beverages (alcoholic, non-alcoholic, dairy, oil &CSD)
- Confectionary
- Cosmetics & healthcare
- Dry food & snacks
- Fresh food
- Homecare & other
- Liquid & canned food
- Pharmaceuticals
- Ready meals
Quality
Even before the end-product is wrapped, canned, bottled or bagged, many packaging machine builders take time to consider their customers operations from start to finish.
The repeatability of operations with high productivity and high quality standards is a daily challenge.
That’s why Omron offers a wide product portfolio adapted to recipe-driven batch production, this requires technologies such as high-speed, high-resolution multi-loop regulation control, high-speed data processing and storage as well as seamless vision-based quality inspection.
Speed
Speed is the main challenge here. But there is also a need for
- product batch size independence
- easy-to-clean and easy-to-operate machines
- maintaining hygiene standards.
This unique combination empowers you to phase-out conventional mechanical systems, and replace them with highly versatile Delta-robot and vision systems.
Flexibility
The key challenges here are:
- to match the production speeds of the primary packaging
- to ensure individual pack or multi-pack integrity
- to ensure easy adaptation of linear guides to convey both primary and secondary packages.
Omron solutions help you build more flexibility into your machines. We can provide the latest robotics and vision systems to help create, for example, robotic cartoners that pick and load 12 products simultaneously, using a pack pattern of either one, two or three layers.
With a set-up like this, increasing the speed is simply a question of increasing the number of products picked per operation.
Robustness
The main challenge here is to ensure that high loads can be reliably handled at continuous high cycle frequencies.
Omron solutions include a wide range of highly robust electromechanical linear axes. Ready-to-install linear modules with different drive variants and turn/gripper modules complete the fully equipped handling modules.
The ability to use electric actuators in any combination also increases the versatility for cost-effective adaptations.
Examples of our automation solutions
Horizontal Form, Fill and Seal
In an HFFS machine a flexible web/foil is unwind, the packs shaped and then sealed on 2 sides, optionally the bottom too. After filled vertically with product, the top side is then sealed to closed the pack. Optionally before the final seal is made, a spout can be added. This all happens with the flexible packaging material moving horizontally, but with the pack orientation still vertical. The picture below shows an intermediate operating, cam driven machine. Also continues machines exist, with these the sections 4 till 6 are often in a carousel set-up.
Horizontal flow wrapper
Rotary sealing knifes (servo driven)
Cardboard sleeve cartoner
A cardboard is removed from the magazine via a rotary feeder and transported in a single lane via a lug belt conveyor up to the receiving position of the pick & place system. The article groups are picked by two independently working robots and stacked onto the cardboards.
Palletiser gantry robot
Gantry robot palletisers are linear, cartesian (XYZ) coordinated robots for pick and place applications. The axes slide linearly in relation to each other, rather than rotate as with a robotic arm.
Vision-guided robotic loading cell or assortment packer
The machine comprises a robot mounted on a frame which overlaps two feeding conveyors running in parallel. One conveyor is feeding the products and another the cartons. The robot picks the products randomly moving on the conveyor belt and places them into the moving cartons. The instantaneous location of moving products is computed by the vision system acquiring images from a stationary camera. Meanwhile a registration sensor is used to track the position of the cartons. This is the accurate tracking of both conveyors which enables the robot to pick and place products from one running conveyor to another.
High speed linear shrink sleeve applicator
Shrink sleeve labels are supplied from a roll in the form of a continuous web, unlabeled bottles are transported via an infeed conveyor and then metered via a rotating feedscrew. While the bottles enter the labeler moving past a trigger cell, the labels in web form are opened and formed into a tube by a mandrel, fed and cut in precise registration with a printed graphic, applied to a bottle which is then conveyed up to a steam tunnel.
Customer references
Cardboard pallets aid sustainability by reducing transportation needs
Delta Engineering uses OMRON technology to control its new pallet assembly robot
Unique high-speed seed counting and packing solution by Micron Milling
Overcoming the challenge of accuracy for a large retail group
Global flexible packaging manufacturer uses automation to power their best-in-class bag making machines
With a strong focus on sustainability, US-based flexible packaging pioneer Liquibox was seeking a way to reduce the amount of waste generated during production of all its pouch and bag-in-box products.
Automated fish filleting solution ensures quality and cost efficiency at Seafood Parlevliet
The Dutch fish manufacturer achieves 75% reduction in manual labour and up to five times the speed with the automated production line. The solution created by Innovotech BV, a local automation partner, includes control and vision systems from OMRON, and enables the company to preserve competitive production in the Netherlands.
Collaborative robots enhance productivity at CLECA
Palletizing process automated with OMRON TM12 cobots
Automation with robotics increases production by 40% at BOLÇİ
Turkish chocolate manufacturer BOLÇİ needed to meet its promise of delivering chocolate products that are ‘untouched by human hand’. Omron and Innovas joined forces to commission a line of three Omron robots in the packaging section of the factory’s production line, with the aim of enhancing production quality and reducing labour costs.
White papers
Validation of Vision Systems used in the Pharmaceutical Industry
A guide to the validation of vision systems used in the pharmaceutical industry using Omron components
Smart factory
Machine Automation concepts to enable innovation for digitalized manufacturing
Integrated Safety Solutions
Industrial automation processes, as well as the machines, are becoming increasingly dynamic. The need to increase productivity, flexibility, ergonomics and safety has become indispensable. This white paper describes how the Omron Sysmac Safety solution enables you to meet all possible safety scenarios and requirements.
Simple motion control implementation
Good programming practices and well organized software implementations with Omron PLC.
Virtual Private Network
Secure Remote Access to machines through VPN.
Fast pattern matching
Faster and more precise image processing methods and technology
Applications
Traceability through serialization
Reduce counterfeiting - increase consumer information
Expert articles
Automate to minimise food product recalls
The amount of product recalls leapt up during 2015. Robert Brooks argues that effective and integrated plant automation can play a lead role in minimising those costly and damaging recalls.
Production using serialised code based sorting by robots
Dennis Verhoeven, European Industrial Market Manager, Life Science at Omron, reviews how product personalisation is increasingly important in the food and beverage industry.
Technology helps machine builders offer improved availability
The ongoing pursuit of ever better OEE scores has become a real focus for end users in the food and beverage industry in recent years. OEE itself, however, is not a conversation end users routinely have with their machinery suppliers, with the focus instead tending to be on areas such as baseline speed, cycle times and overall performance.
Maximise your potential with data integration
How close is ‘Industry 4.0’ to being a reality? A futuristic, completely-connected industrial world is already taking shape, and data integration is a key enabler. Collecting and storing production data also offers many other rewards – from measuring OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) to helping OEMs meet increasing legal requirements for reporting. Dan Rossek takes a deeper look into the challenges and benefits of data integration in ‘From shop floor to top floor’.
Seize opportunities with robotics
Integrating robotics into our systems – and our thinking.
Traceability through serialisation
The demand for greater traceability – to reduce counterfeiting and improve consumer information – presents growing challenges for manufacturers. How can serialisation help? In ‘Traceability through serialisation’ Dan Rossek focuses on what serialisation means today and shows why the flexible layer solution is better than the, seemingly easier, end-to-end solution.
New approach to machine control boosts performance
Can you add value to your machines, perhaps adding greater sophistication and complexity, without impacting on development time and programming cost? Robert Brooks looks at the evolution of a new breed of machine controllers.
Challenges in machine building
The ramping up of the low wage economies in the machine building sector means that OEMs often feel they are working under the shadow of the threat of cheap imports. In the first of a series of articles, Robert Brooks looks at the ‘must-have’ features that will keep UK machine builders ahead of the pack, and the opportunities to add even greater value.
An integrated approach to machinery safety
In this third of a series of articles looking at the challenges surrounding machine building, Dan Rossek and Richard Wilkins examine how safety can be an enabler for increased productivity and reduced total cost of ownership.
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