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Best practices for buffering and packaging line design

Whether or not to buffer a packaging line ranks right up there with Total Cost of Ownership as one of the most divisive issues pertaining to automated packaging lines.

We talked to experts on both sides of the debate, and came up with the following considerations that can help keep your lines moving:

1. Use buffering to add value, not cover weaknesses. Buffering isn’t intended for convenience, or to cover weaknesses in line flow and speed. A buffer may be hiding performance issues upstream or downstream.

2. Higher line speeds require more buffering. The higher the line speed, the more likely buffers will be required, precisely because the cost of downtime increases commensurately with the number of packages produced per minute. On a line moving 60 items/min, no buffering is typically needed because people can physically offload product to a cart. At around 100 products/min, it may be necessary to install a buffering solution.

3. Buffering smoothes out certain processes. Buffers may also be required for processes that take time, such as drying packages emerging from a water bath, evacuating air from pouches before filling, or the strict dwell-time and temperature standards of heat pasteurization.

4. Buffer to close gaps caused by intermittent motion. Indexing machines and batch processes with gaps in their motion or flow may require buffers, as opposed to the steady stream of continuous processes. Remove bottlenecks by using buffers to mitigate intermittent gaps in flow.

5. Transition from processing to packaging. Some form of accumulation may be necessary to accommodate quality checks before products are released to packaging. Limiting the number of items on the line at quality checkpoints, however, helps keep the focus on process improvement with minimal accumulation.

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