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Automating the sleeve label that stuck

Gorilla Glue’s tape line doesn’t waste any label space–all three visible sides of the roll are pulling their weight in branding and messaging. But as volume grew, the company needed automation that could balance speed with an accurately placed, repeatable shrink-sleeve label.

The continuous sleeve is metered, then cut to length on the fly, at a standard running rate of 80/min.
The continuous sleeve is metered, then cut to length on the fly, at a standard running rate of 80/min.

For more than 20 years, The Gorilla Glue Company has been selling an original glue product derived from a traditional Indonesian teak furniture adhesive. The Cincinnati company has since expanded its offerings to include Gorilla® Super Glue, Gorilla® Construction Adhesive, and other premium tapes, sealants, and adhesives.

One of the more visible products on hardware and big box store shelves is Gorilla Tape®, recognizable by packaging that features a heavy-browed ape that meets the eyes of would-be DIY weekend warriors and contractors alike. The company uses a host of retail displays and pack formats, but the common denominator is the shrink sleeve.

When Gorilla Glue added the tape line 14 years ago, Tripack, a nearby OEM, demonstrated to the brand just how premium a PET shrink sleeve could make its new rolls of tape look. This three-dimensional label style would let the company take advantage of messaging and branding on each of the surfaces—curved or flat—no matter how the roll was oriented in a display, in a pack, or on a shelf. Plus, according to Tripack, all pertinent information could be applied via one flexible, reliable system. The packaging methodology stuck.

Automation evolution
For the first 14 years, the company considered shrink-sleeve labels to be its preferred method to market and package the tape, and the attitude continues to this day. In fact, it’s now part of the brand identity.

“Since the beginning, we’ve been on a very good growth rate at our company, and tape became one of the core growth items,” says Nik Kostopoulos, Vice President, Engineering and Quality Assurance. “We started off by buying one machine from Tripack at that time, and since then, have bought a second, a third, and, a few months ago, a fourth, just to keep up with the demand. Each machine we’ve bought has represented an improvement in speed, capability, and reliability. The appearance of the product kept improving over the years as well.”

But each machine purchase didn’t come at the expense of a predecessor. The most recent Tripack addition joins the previous three machines—still going strong—to make up the company’s four shrink-sleeve packaging lines. Of course, the first machines were quite manual. Operators hand-placed the rolls of tape into a puck and removed sleeved rolls from each puck by hand. The latest version is much more automatic. Rolls accumulate, then are conveyed, spaced, and automatically installed into a puck system, and are doing so running at a clip of 80 pucks/min, or 80 rolls of tape/min.

“The evolution over time represents a joint effort between what we understand and know, and what Tripack understands and knows,” Kostopoulos says. “We’ve worked closely together to keep making things quicker, better, and easier for us to assemble. We’ve continued to make the older machines more repeatable, and Tripack has been there to help us. They’ve been involved with machine integration, they’ve supported start-ups and new formats, and they’ve helped us keep the machines running, even the older ones with tons of cycles on them.”

All new line automates pucks
To meet messaging demands and avoid sticky exposed tape adhesive, all Gorilla Tape shrink-sleeve label applications require an underwrap. That means the sleever can’t accept flat tapes on a conveyor—each roll needs to be elevated when it gets to the sleever. This is what necessitated a puck system. But on the new, twice-as-fast sleever that the company purchased last year, an all-new material handling system was needed.

A key requirement for the new piece of equipment was the ability to run multiple sizes of tape rolls on the same machine. The new shrink sleever they designed—not completely built to order, but close to it—was able to achieve this by ensuring the puck conveyor system could accept and fit multiple tape sizes without any changeover.

“There’s a sizable number of individual pucks on that conveyor system, and each one would have to be changed out if different tape sizes required different pucks,” Kostopoulos says. “Even a quick changeover would still take quite a bit of time, but not having to change that at all was just a huge benefit for us for flexibility of manufacturing.”

Feeding the puck-studded conveyor is an accumulation table, usually kept back-fed to at least six feet of depth measured in horizontal tape rolls. It collects and feeds each roll into a timing screw, and servos assist in dropping and loading each roll into a receptive puck on the conveyor.

“Previously, this had been a hand-loading operation,” Kostopoulos says. “When you try to time and place a puck by hand, you had better land it. In the case of a distracted operator, for instance, once you miss it, you can’t get it back, and that’s compounded downstream as operators pack rolls into cases and pallets, there’s an opportunity cost all the way down the line. So now, with automated placement of rolls in every puck, plus an accumulation zone that always stays filled, we’re not missing any pucks, ever, throughout the day.”

Given the slower speeds of older machines, this was less of a problem. Two operators, working in harmony or rhythm, could manage and quickly recover from breaks in concentration. But even then, people weren’t perfect. And as potential sleeving speeds grew from 40 or 50/min to 80/min, the upper bounds of manual operation quickly came into sight.

“Just to put an arbitrary manual performance number on that, if a manual operator missed one puck every minute, or one out of every 40 at a 40-per-minute rate, that’s a 2.5 percent throughput reduction,” Kostopoulos says. “By automating it to make it very repeatable and efficient all the way through, and by taking out that human element of coordination between two people, we could pair faster speeds with zero missed pucks.”

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