The night shift workshop of a dairy factory in Hebei was brightly lit, and three packaging machines suddenly lit up yellow lights at the same time - this was an early warning signal for production line switching. Operator Master Wang walked quickly to the control console and tapped the touch screen a few times with his fingertips. The equipment that originally processed 250ml Tetra Pak packages began to automatically adjust the track width. Two minutes later, the production line began to smoothly fill the newly launched 180ml children's yogurt, without stopping a box of milk bottles during the whole process.
"Half a year ago, such a production line switch would take at least 40 minutes." The person in charge of the factory's equipment department sighed as he touched the warm mechanical shell. This transformation began with the flexible production line transformation plan customized by the ply-pack team. Now the workshop can process 8 different specifications of products per day, and the order response speed has increased by 300%.
This dairy company with an annual output value of over 2 billion yuan was once deeply trapped in "happy troubles": the social marketing of Internet celebrity yogurt has triggered market demand, but the packaging production line switching takes too long and leads to frequent out-of-stock. Each time the traditional equipment is changed, 5 engineers need to manually adjust 23 mechanical parameters, and the loss caused by the stagnation of the production line during the period is as high as 80 yuan per minute.
"At the worst, the customer complaint rate soared to 15%." The production director turned out the duty record at that time: on the first day of the launch of the limited edition of the cherry blossom season in March, 30,000 bottles of products were not shipped on time due to the jam of the packaging machine. This rigid production model has become a key shackle that restricts enterprises from seizing market opportunities.
After the ply-pack engineering team moved in, they implanted a "thinking" intelligent collaborative system into the workshop. The system achieves flexible transformation through three modules:
.Visual positioning module captures the size of the packaging box in real time and automatically generates the trajectory of the robot arm
.Dynamic parameter library stores 200+ preset solutions and automatically retrieves the corresponding data when changing models
.Self-learning compensation algorithm fine-tunes the operating parameters according to the degree of equipment wear
"It's like installing a conditioned reflex nerve on the machine." When technician Xiao Liu demonstrated, he deliberately mixed two sizes of yogurt bottles into the conveyor belt. The robot arm quickly identified the difference, drew two staggered arcs in the air, and accurately completed the sorting and packaging. This system reduces the manual intervention link by 72%, and the changeover efficiency reaches the top level in the industry.
The transformed production line presents a new ecology: the operator transforms from "equipment adjuster" to "system administrator", monitoring the equipment status through a handheld terminal; the robot arm autonomously adjusts the work rhythm according to the fluctuation of orders, turns on the "runaway mode" during peak hours, and enters the energy-saving state during idle time.
"Now when receiving an urgent order, the workshop director can complete the production line switch while drinking coffee." The logistics supervisor pointed to the real-time updated electronic billboard and smiled. Last month, the company successfully received a three-day express delivery order from a convenience store chain, completing the production and delivery of 120,000 bottles of customized yogurt in 78 hours, and the customer repurchase rate increased to 92%.
The shift change bell rang in the twilight factory, and Master Wang turned off the power of the last process. A set of data popped up on the display: 478,000 bottles were produced today, the specification was switched 11 times, and it ran for 18.6 hours without any failure. "What makes me most at ease about this system is-" He paused and pointed to the flashing green indicator light on the console, "It is always half a step faster than market changes."
