Just after seven o'clock in the morning, a video call from a snail noodle factory in Guangxi popped up on my desk. In the picture, their workshop director held a bowl-sized material bag and shouted: "Mr. Wang, your automatic packaging system is really amazing! The sour bamboo shoots buns that were debugged yesterday, today we changed to bean curd buns, and we don't need to change the mold?" Listening to the customer's surprise and joy, I smiled knowingly with my thermos cup in my hand - this is nothing new. Our factory's third-generation automatic packaging system is all about "using softness to overcome hardness".
When I started to take over the solution design three years ago, I was most afraid of encountering customers who wanted to "share production lines". For example, the group customer who was engaged in OEM of cosmetics and health products last year had three types of bottle materials: PET, glass, and acrylic, which traditional equipment could not handle at all. At that time, our technical team spent a whole month in the workshop and changed the grabbing module of the automatic packaging system to an adaptive air cushion structure. Now, let alone changing the packaging material, even if we encounter a pebble-shaped essential oil bottle, the robot arm can steadily code it into the color box.
Speaking of the capabilities of this system, the pet food factory that I went to inspect last week is a living example. Their flexible production line has to handle both 500-gram bagged food and 5-kilogram vertical bags. In the past, two sets of equipment had to be turned on in turn, but now the automatic packaging system can identify product specifications by itself, and the conveyor belt speed, sealing temperature, and inkjet position are automatically switched. The most amazing thing is the energy consumption optimization module. When producing small packages at night, it automatically switches to energy-saving mode, and the electricity bill has dropped by 12% compared with the same period last year-this is the data that the customer showed me with the bill himself.
Of course, good equipment must be accompanied by a reliable turnkey project. The renovation project for the Northeast Frozen Food Factory last month took a total of 28 days from on-site mapping to trial operation. Their automatic packaging system must be compatible with two types of packaging: dumpling boxes and hot pot material rolls. Our engineers debugged it in a cold storage at minus 15 degrees for three days. Now the customer tells everyone: "Their service is as smart as the equipment, and they even consider the icing problem at the loading and unloading port of the cold chain vehicle."
Recently, the order from the multinational daily chemical group has made me feel particularly accomplished. They have to package shampoo refills and replacement toothbrushes on the same production line, and the weight difference between the two products is more than 20 times. When we demonstrated how the automatic packaging system can automatically divert through dynamic weighing, the other party's technical director directly took out his mobile phone to record: "We need to write this dynamic compensation function into the acceptance criteria!" Later I heard that this case was also used by their headquarters as a model for intelligent upgrades in the Asia-Pacific region.
Before leaving get off work, Xiao Liu from the marketing department brought a stack of new proposal covers for me to choose. The gold-plated words "Special-shaped Parts Packaging Expert" on the cover are eye-catching, but the small words below are more realistic: the automatic packaging system makes every irregularity have a perfect destination. This makes sense. Think about the Chinese herbal medicine customer I'm going to talk to tomorrow. Aren't their strange-shaped herbal medicine packages waiting for our system to "tame" them?
