Our factory's old Zhang has been the director of the packaging workshop for 20 years. Last year, he was almost angry and had high blood pressure - the young man on the production line next door cut a third of the entire roll of aluminum-coated film, and the scraps were piled higher than a person. If this happened in the past, it would be nothing more than a few scoldings and adjusting the parameters of the cutter head, but in the past two years, the price of raw materials has been rising, and customers have been asking every day "Can you save more materials?" Well, our technical department gritted its teeth and took out the intelligent cutting system at the bottom of the box, and said goodbye to the days of "adjusting the machine based on experience"!
The "invisible gold mountain" in the cutting workshop
To be honest, we didn't expect that packaging material waste could be so deadly before. Last month, when I visited a customer, I saw the floor of the workshop was covered with leftover PVC strips. The worker smiled bitterly and said, "There are so many left after cutting a roll of material. The boss said that these scraps are not enough to pay for the freight." We calculated that the material loss rate of ordinary vertical packaging machines is generally 8%-15%. If you encounter special-shaped packaging or small batch orders, the waste is even more frightening. This is not just a matter of money - environmental protection review, customer factory inspection, no one can avoid the "waste reduction" index.
Let the machine learn to "calculate carefully"
Why is traditional cutting always wasteful? To put it bluntly, it is the "one-size-fits-all" thinking. The intelligent cutting system we developed has done something that subverts the industry: equipping the cutter with the "strongest brain". The built-in dynamic typesetting algorithm of this system can generate the optimal cutting path in real time according to the width of the roll, pattern spacing and even material ductility. Let me give you a real example: after a biscuit factory used our system, it had to leave a 5mm safety margin when cutting round trays. Now the algorithm automatically interlaces adjacent patterns and compresses the margin to 2mm without making mistakes. In the words of their purchasing manager: "Your system 'knows' how to save materials better than the old master!"
Customer site: From pain to deliciousness
Last year, when installing an intelligent cutting system for a fast food package company in Zhejiang, the boss of the other party had a dark face throughout the process: "If such an expensive equipment can't save money, I will ask you for compensation!" As a result, three months later, he took the initiative to call us: "Quickly send an engineer to install it! All the new pet food orders we received are special-shaped bags. The old equipment wastes half a roll of film after cutting one order. Your system can actually automatically identify the shape of bones and stuff the scraps into small packaging bags for secondary use." The most amazing thing is that the system will dynamically adjust the layout strategy according to the order volume-large orders pursue speed, and small orders pursue saving materials. This "smartness" even convinced the workshop director who has worked for 15 years.
Saving materials ≠ reducing quality, precision is the bottom line
Some people worry: Will such "stingy" cutting affect the sealing? We have thought about this issue thoroughly. The sub-pixel visual inspection module equipped with the intelligent cutting system can control the blade error within the diameter of a hair in high-speed cutting of 120 times per minute. Last month, when a pharmaceutical company was inspected, it compared the cutting sections of our equipment with those of the old imported machine with a magnifying glass, and finally gave a thumbs up: "Your cutting accuracy is enough for heart stent packaging!"
The future has come: let waste become history
Now our factory engineers always carry a "treasure box" in their work clothes pockets - it is full of scraps picked up from the customer's workshop. "This is the PET film saved after using our system" "This is the aluminum foil composite material left over from the seafood sauce packaging", and each piece of waste is marked with optimization potential. The next step is to let the intelligent cutting system learn "cross-process collaboration", such as synchronizing the cutting data to the printing link to adjust the ink volume, or recommending recycling solutions based on the characteristics of the scraps. After all, in the packaging industry, every centimeter of material saved is a real competitive advantage.
