When doing equipment inspections at customers in the Yangtze River Delta, I heard the loud voice of production supervisor Lao Zhang from a distance: "If your high-speed packaging machine keeps running like crazy, my two operators will be so idle that they will eat melon seeds!" This sounds like a complaint, but in fact it hides joy - since the replacement of our factory's new equipment, their daily output has turned upside down. This reminds me of the scene three years ago, in the same workshop, the old masters were still guarding the old-fashioned machines in three shifts to rush to work.
Those who work in our industry know that the most feared thing about high-speed packaging machines is "getting up and throwing a tantrum". Last year, a customer who made instant noodles used equipment with a nominal speed of 120 packs per minute. In fact, it started to break down after running 100 packs. It was either stuck or leaking. After three days of investigation, our engineers found that the problem was the coordination between the feeding system and the heat sealing mechanism - just like a sprinter wearing leather shoes, he will definitely fall if he takes a big step.
Now we have installed a "nerve center" on the high-speed packaging machine, and the self-developed dynamic compensation algorithm can adjust the rhythm of each module in real time. You may not imagine that this system was originally inspired by the suspension device of F1 racing cars. Last month, when debugging equipment for a spicy noodle factory in the southwest, the factory manager looked at the stable data of 150 packs/minute on the monitoring screen, turned to the purchasing manager and said: "If we had changed this two years earlier, we would not have been scolded by the distributor for being out of stock on Double Eleven last year."
Recently, there have been obviously more customers in the pharmaceutical industry, which is quite interesting. It turns out that a pharmaceutical company was troubled by mask packaging. Ordinary high-speed packaging machines are good for flat masks, but they are at a loss when they encounter three-dimensional shapes like N95. Several of our technicians spent two weeks in the customer's workshop, and changed the special-shaped gripping module originally designed for puffed food into a medical-grade silicone suction cup. Now their production line packs masks in the morning and switches to aluminum foil packaging for effervescent tablets in the afternoon. The changeover time is shorter than the workers' lunch break.
A customer who makes pet food said it more bluntly: "Your high-speed packaging machine is like a transformer. It just finished packing 2 kg dog food bags last week, and this week it cut to 50 g cat strips packaging, and you don't even need to teach the parameters again!" Behind this flexibility, we have integrated more than 20 kinds of industry packaging data into the intelligent memory library, and the machine can automatically match the best solution when switching categories.
Last fall, there was an incident that impressed me deeply. The high-speed packaging machine of a dairy company in the north suddenly broke down in the middle of the night, and the local supplier searched the warehouse but couldn't find a suitable cutter component. After we received the call, we transferred the goods from Suzhou and transferred them in Zhengzhou, and delivered the parts to the workshop in Hulunbuir within 24 hours. Since then, our factory has incorporated the spare parts supply system into the core of the solution. Now there are eight emergency warehouses across the country. Common spare parts are guaranteed to be shipped out within two hours, and quick replacement kits have been developed for wearing parts.
An old customer who has used our equipment for five years summed it up succinctly: "Your high-speed packaging machine is like your own daughter-in-law. She works well on weekdays, but occasionally she gets a little mad. You can call her to fix it with just one phone call." This is rough but true. After all, in the manufacturing industry, every minute and every second of equipment downtime is real money.
Recently, there are always people in the industry discussing "smart factories". In my opinion, no matter how cool the concept is, it must be implemented on specific equipment. Just like this high-speed packaging machine in our factory, it may not say anything about IoT big data, but its seven sensors, three sets of self-test programs, and 100,000 operating data recorded silently every day are silently helping customers turn their production capacity blueprints into reality. Next time you come to visit the factory, if you see the R&D department disassembling and assembling equipment again, don’t be surprised - they may have learned some new tricks from some other industry and are preparing to add some "super powers" to the high-speed packaging machines!
