Over the past 15 years, a Beumer packaging system has helped to palletise and pack more than one million pallets of salt for AkzoNobel in Mariager. Throughout this time, it has been operating in a saline environment and at high speeds, without requiring major maintenance. The Chief Technical Officer at AkzoNobel, Ivan Kondrup, even says he can see no reason why the plant should not be operational for another 15 years. Thus Beumer plants stand for durability and sustainable operation.
Palletising and packaging is an essential part of the production process at AkzoNobel, the largest producer of salt in Denmark. At the same time, palletizing and packaging is also an important competitive factor in the market. Back in 1996, 15 years ago, packaging had become a bottleneck at AkzoNobel, which is why Ivan Kondrup, the company's Chief Technical Officer, contacted a number of suppliers of end-of-line packaging solutions in order to find a new plant.
Beumer enables cost reductions
"Maintenance costs at our old plant were increasing more and more. Also, when changing pallet patterns, manual operation was required. This meant higher costs and reduced efficiency. Consequently we investigated a series of possibilities and then chose BEUMER as our new supplier. The Beumer system offered high capacity as well as the necessary level of flexibility and the pallets were reliably protected and packed. Moreover, the plant met the material requirements arising from salt production, and at the same time it fulfilled all our functional requirements," says Ivan Kondrup.
AkzoNobel decided to replace an older shrink-wrap machine with a new Beumer stretch hood system, which was better capable of packaging the increased output from the bagging machine. Confidence in Beumer and the anticipated increase in efficiency due to sourcing from one single supplier for the entire packaging line were the reasons behind the choice of the Beumer stretch hood machine.
15 years young and still up-to-date
Service and maintenance at the plants has been straight forward and in most cases AkzoNobel has been able to manage without external specialist input. "When we bought the technology from Beumer, we based our financial calculations on a ten-year run, but today we reckon that the mechanical parts may last for at least 30 years. Even if the technology is a couple of years old, there is no reason to acquire new solutions. In cooperation with Beumer we have made adjustments to the electronic controls and to the mechanicals parts, which have increased our capacity," Ivan Kondrup explains. Thus the plant as a whole is up-to-date and lives up to AkzoNobel's demands for efficiency and profitability as well as to the expectations placed on new products on the market even though the plant has already processed more than one million pallets. "We demand a lot from our equipment. Among other things, all steel parts coming into contact with salt must be made from stainless steel, and we have also tightened our demands regarding surface treatment. Beumer has been able to live up to all these requirements, and even after 15 years of packaging salt the plant shows no signs of corrosion,' says Ivan Kondrup.
Top-of-the-range packaging technology
The Beumer stretch hood is a high-capacity packaging system. Compared with conventional packaging methods such as stretch wrapping and shrinking methods, the Beumer stretch hood method combines the advantages of the aforementioned systems whilst avoiding their disadvantages. The result is a high-capacity packaging machine that produces an excellent display effect, five-sided product protection, elimination of laminates, protection against theft, low maintenance expenses, minimised packaging costs and increased throughput capacity. The Beumer stretch hood i is the next generation of end-of-line pallet packaging systems to be introduced to the market by the Beckum-based intralogistics specialist. The system offers reduced energy consumption and has a smaller footprint, thus creating more efficient processes. Optimized controls allow the machine to be operated intuitively. These new developments also bring about an improved price-performance ratio.
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