To speed up production lines, many manufacturers employ parallel stations at one or more steps in the process. This approach allows faster processing than a strictly linear configuration, but there is a commonly overlooked inefficiency on these production lines: the system used to transfer the products from a mass flow to the parallel stations.
The current solution in most plants is a metering system in which products move along a conveyor, stopping at each station in turn until they find an open one. This is equivalent to driving down a street and hitting a red light at every intersection—eventually, you’ll get where you’re going, but it can take a long time. In addition, if one of the parallel processing machines goes down, it results in the stoppage of the entire line, like a red light that never turns green.
Garvey Accumulators and Conveyors' new solution, which was debuted during PACK EXPO Las Vegas, turns that street into a superhighway. By leveraging our patented accumulation technology, we’ve developed a new on-demand distribution system that transfers products from a mass flow to parallel stations with no stopping, no waiting, and no downtime.
Instead of stopping at each station, the products on a Garvey distribution system circulate continuously until they encounter an empty machine. This speeds up production time and improves throughput in two main ways:
The design guarantees that no machine is sitting idle when it could be processing products. Every machine has a steady flow of inputs at all times.
If a machine goes down, the rest of the parallel stations can keep running. An individual machine failure does not cause the stoppage of the line as a whole.
“Many manufacturers today are struggling to meet consumer demand, and they simply can’t afford to lose any time to unnecessary inefficiencies,” said Thomas Garvey, President of Garvey Corporation. “Our on-demand distribution systems speed up production, increase throughput, and help our customers get more value out of all of their equipment. The upshot is greater productivity, less downtime, and, ultimately, higher profits.”
