Garvey Conveyors (Garvey)
Machinery : Process Technology : Conveyor System
Established in 1926, Garvey Corporation has grown into a global leader producing conveying, accumulating, and automation solutions. Our designs are unmatched in the food, pharmaceutical, personal care and beverage industries. We pride ourselves on handling unstable products better than anyone in the world and specialize in helping companies build efficient production lines and show how to maximize throughput for increased profitability. We do this by performing an expert line analysis on your current automated lines and placing accumulation in the right location, which often can boost your overall, end-of-line, throughput by up to 30%. This increase is accomplished by identifying the constraint in the production line and to never allow other machine’s downtime to cause the constraint to stop when it is capable of running at full capacity.
Assembly Line
Huge Improvements for Small Vials
Serum vials used in the pharmaceutical industry may be tiny, but their impact on public health is astronomically enormous. We have previously discussed COVID vaccine vials in the cold chain, and that is just one example. Vial damage, contamination, and bottlenecks on the line are common problems that are only exacerbated as they get smaller in size.
In this post, we will chat a little about various applications for vials, and some considerations pharmaceutical companies must make. We will then discuss how Garvey’s Infinity™ Rx Accumulation Table eliminates many issues companies face when working with vials as small as 1.5 mL.
How to Calculate Production Line Efficiency and Increase Your Throughput
As the filler is usually the most expensive machine on the line, we are in business and can move forward on ways to keep it running. We will aim to get the line’s throughput as close to the 167 bottles per minute (BPM) figure as possible.
Accumulation systems are designed to create buffers when a machine goes down to prevent having to shut down the entire line. Remember, we want to keep the constraint running as much as possible. By adding one or more accumulators on the line, you can avoid shutting down the constraint as you get your other machines back up. This can get the line’s throughput as close to the constraint’s maximum throughput as possible. Again, we will use our example to show you what happens when adding accumulation.
How to Maximize Your Production: Line Analysis
Each of these machines has its own efficiency, design rate, and throughput. However, the line is working as one group to operate. By performing a line analysis, you can pinpoint the machine with the lowest throughput that puts a constraint on the rest of the line.
In the case of the example wine production line, the filler has the slowest throughput. By adding an accumulator before and after the filler, bottles can be diverted at any time. So, suppose the labeler is down momentarily because it’s run out of labels or the capsular needs refilling. In that case, the filler can keep on running independently and divert products to the accumulator instead.