Automated Packaging
Case Study
Slane Hosiery Mills (athletic socks manufacturer)
Project: Automated packaging process
Slane Hosiery Mills manufacturers athletic socks for major sportswear companies at its plant in High Point, N.C. The High Point plant performs all of the operations involved in the manufacturing process: knitting, dyeing, finishing, and packaging. Until recently, the wrong materials handling system in one area of the plant was limiting employee productivity and plant output.
In the plant's packaging operation, employees received socks from the finishing area, packaged them, and then sent them on to shipping. For a number of years, the packaging operation was an entirely manual one. Employees loaded cartons onto sections of manually powered roller or skatewheel conveyor, then pushed the cartons along to the next work area. Due to poor system layout, the conveyors consumed more than their share of floor space, limiting the amount of space available for workstations.
Recognizing that their packaging operation needed a boost, company managers approached Advanced Equipment Co., and asked for possible automated packaging solutions. AEC recommended tearing out the manual conveyor system and replacing it with powered conveyors specifically designed to meet the needs of both the application and the building layout.
Company managers considered a number of possible solutions, but decided that the idea of converting from an entirely manual operation to one based on the use of powered conveyor systems held the most promise. Plant Engineer Steve Ferguson recalls the logic behind their decision: "The High Point plant is our only facility that makes athletic socks. We were therefore not in a position to risk plant production by experimenting with different design approaches. We needed a system that would go in as promised, start up as promised, and perform as promised.
"Those requirements translated into a need to use a distributor that could correctly apply the conveyor manufacturer's products to our application. Regardless of the quality of the materials handling equipment, if it isn't correctly applied for the specific application, the odds that it is going to provide the solution that the user is looking for are pretty slim."
Advanced Equipment Company's installation and start-up of the new automated packaging system went without a hitch, according to Wesley Hutchins, Assistant Plant Manager at the High Point facility. "Once it was installed, it took about twelve minutes to get the whole system up and running. And it's been running with very little unscheduled downtime ever since," says Hutchins.
The new automated packaging system has provided other benefits as well. Hutchins explains: "By tearing out all of the old conveyor and starting the layout design from scratch, we were able to really optimize our use of existing floor space. As a result, we have been able to add over a dozen new workstations in this area. As you can imagine, it would have been easy to cost-justify this conversion to a powered conveyor system based just on the production increase of the new workstations."
The combination of the new powered conveyor system and the additional workstations has produced an impressive 20 to 25% increase in plant output. And by eliminating the manual pushing of cartons on the old conveyors and reducing the amount of lifting required, the new powered conveyor system has improved employee morale.
According to Maintenance Technician Kenneth Conrad, the plant's new powered conveyor system not only delivers the goods - it does so while requiring very little maintenance. "We do have a good preventative maintenance program set up here at our High Point plant, but frankly, this new system requires very little attention."
Products Used:
- Hytrol powered conveyors
