"Mr. Liu, you will be scolded by the boss again this month!" Old Zhou, who rushed into my office at the beginning of last month, slapped the table with a raw material loss report. The equipment supervisor of the puffed food factory pointed to the old-fashioned cutting machine in the workshop that had been in service for eight years and sighed: "Just the crooked packaging bags can be picked up in three baskets a day!"
I am familiar with this matter-last year, when I participated in the industry exhibition, eight out of ten customers complained about cutting losses. The pain point of their factory is more typical: the puffed food packaging machine runs fast, but the cutting system always lags behind. Either the jagged edge affects the sealing quality, or the cutting is off-center and leaks, and the rework rate remains high. Lao Zhou counted on his fingers: "If we consume two more rolls of film every month, we will lose a car by the end of the year!"
Our factory's intelligent cutting system is specifically designed to treat this kind of "bleeding point". Last month, I took the technical team to the site for investigation. The old machine in the workshop had to stop and calibrate after cutting ten bags. On the day the new system was installed, the operator Xiao Li stared at the touch screen and muttered: "This fancy interface can be better than the manual knife adjustment of the old master?" As a result, after the first test run, he held up a magnifying glass to compare the cuts, and his expression was like seeing alien technology.
The killer feature of this system is the dynamic knife mold calibration technology. Just like our factory master Zhang's twenty years of hand feel has become a data model-the packaging film deviates by 0.5 mm, and the knife head can automatically compensate in the blink of an eye. During a return visit last week, the raw material loss curve on the wall of the old workshop changed from a roller coaster to a horizontal line. The most amazing thing is the scrap recycling device, which presses the cut waste film into a whole roll for secondary use. This alone can save a technician's salary every month.
You may not know that cutting accuracy directly affects the quality of packaging sealing. Before, their factory was always complained about air leakage at the bag mouth. After replacing the intelligent system, the quality inspector Xiao Yang took the heat seal tester and exclaimed: "The tensile strength has increased by two levels. Now you have to use a lot of force to tear the bag mouth!" This matter also alarmed their R&D department. Recently, they are testing more advanced stand-up bag packaging. It is said that it is for the confidence given by the cutting system.
There are also episodes in the debugging process. During the night shift trial production, a batch of thin packaging films was suddenly replaced, and the sensor did not recognize the material change. The maintenance worker Da Chen on duty at the time was quick-witted and manually triggered the system self-learning mode, and adjusted the new cutting parameters in half an hour. This incident has helped us discover a business opportunity - now the system has pre-stored data on more than 20 types of film materials, and it is as easy for customers to switch material packages as to choose mobile phone wallpapers.
At the last quarter's summary meeting, their financial director did some calculations: the intelligent cutting system has been in use for half a year, and the money saved on film materials is actually equivalent to the depreciation of half a new production line! This was heard by our factory director, who decided to increase the budget for the R&D department: "The real money saved by customers is the best product manual."
What made me even more proud was the scene I saw during the after-sales return visit - the workshop director Lao Zhou was demonstrating the cutting process to a new customer, pointing to the trajectory of the knife head and boasting: "Look at this silky smoothness, German equipment is only at this level!" In fact, he didn't say it all. Our intelligent system can also update parameters in the cloud. We just added a special-shaped bag cutting mode last week. I didn't tell them about this, and I was going to give them a surprise when they launched new models next month.
Recently, the industry has been blowing the wind of "extreme cost reduction", and several customers have come to inquire about prices with Lao Zhou's cases. If you ask me, the intelligent cutting system is like installing a "CT machine" on the packaging machine, which can clearly see where the waste and the weak parts are. Next time if you encounter the annoying problems of inaccurate cutting and loose sealing, you may want to come to our test machine workshop for a look. We will definitely let you see what the real skill of "saving material under the knife" is!
