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Creative cooperation at Valvoline

By getting a little creative with its suppliers, the Valvoline Co. was able to overcome budgetary constraints that could have prevented a badly needed equipment upgrade.

With its center support and double-wall corners, the H-bliss-style box (above) was perfect for Valvoline's offset-neck bottle (b
With its center support and double-wall corners, the H-bliss-style box (above) was perfect for Valvoline's offset-neck bottle (b

What‘¯s a packager to do when he knows his plant needs new packaging equipment but top management is skittish about capital outlays? At the Cincinnati packaging plant of the Valvoline Co., the answer was simple enough: Let the packaging materials supplier help pay for the new equipment.

This innovative approach worked for a line dedicated to 4- and 5-qt HDPE bottles of Valvoline motor oil. Installed was a Model PF 106-HLV H-bliss box erector from Moen Industries (Santa Fe Springs, CA). Before its arrival, in-mold-labeled motor oil bottles from Graham Packaging (York, PA) arrived in bulk boxes. The bottles were dumped into an unscrambler and then conveyed through filling and capping before being drop-packed into a 275#-test double-wall B/C-flute corrugated shipper supplied by International Paper (Memphis, TN).

According to Valvoline packaging engineer Steve Ruble, the case erector in this arrangement was proving to be a real bottleneck, partly because its magazine could only hold a minimal number of knocked-down case blanks. That meant it required regular attention from an operator.

Added operator time had to be spent ‘°babysitting‘± the case flaps at the infeed of the drop packer.

‘°Just before the case goes into a drop packer, plows bend the flaps back so that bottles can drop freely into the case,‘± explains Ruble. ‘°The double-wall board was so heavy the flaps would sometimes spring back in the way and jam things up. If a case was jammed badly enough, it might knock the plows out of adjustment, or even bend a plow. It was getting to be a real maintenance and repair issue. Now it‘¯s been eliminated.‘±

Adds Ruble, ‘°We also wanted to get away from the need to have an operator dumping bottles from boxes,‘± another labor-intensive and less than ergonomically ideal operation.

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