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L’Oréal Replaces 5 Machines with One Smart System

Facing SKU proliferation and shorter runs, the L’Oreal Group replaced an outdated system with a new track-based system of movers that brings fast changeover and high output.

The highly compact XTS has a circumferential track length of 22 m and uses a total of 40 independent movers. The L’Oréal Group produces high-quality skin care products, mascaras, and foundation makeup for its Division Luxe.
The highly compact XTS has a circumferential track length of 22 m and uses a total of 40 independent movers. The L’Oréal Group produces high-quality skin care products, mascaras, and foundation makeup for its Division Luxe.

In its Caudry plant in the north of France, the L’Oréal Group produces high-quality skin care products, mascaras, and foundation makeup for its Division Luxe. Faced with trends such as increasing individualization and smaller production quantities that present challenges in the growing luxury segment, the L’Oreal managing board set the strategic goal to make the company’s production operations more agile. That’s why three production lines in the plant are based on the Beckhoff eXtended Transport System (XTS). One of these lines is the new Agile F24 filling and capping line for the production of foundation makeup, a system that combines fast format changes with increased output.

Previously, the line on which these products were made consisted of multiple machines from different vendors that were connected in a conventional material flow by way of conveyor systems and product buffers. But its lack of flexibility meant that it was no longer able to support the growing bandwidth of product variants and the cost-effective production of increasingly smaller lot sizes. That’s what led to the development of the Agile F24 line, a fundamental realignment that accommodates the production of all formats while also permitting rapid changeover.

The new line was planned by a L’Oréal team of nine under the leadership of Franck Lefort, project manager at the Division Luxe. The system specifications were developed in cooperation with machine builder Secad   Following an evaluation, the parties decided to replace the existing machines with a single line based on the intelligent transport system XTS.

According to Lefort, the biggest challenge of the new implementation was to make the overall production process independent of rigid machine cycles. “While we previously solved this problem with conveyors and product buffers between the machines, one of the key advantages of the XTS lies in the individual control of the movers,” says Lefort. “This capability enables machine cycles to be decoupled from the duration of individual processing steps, for example, by installing multiples of the more time-intensive processing stations along the transport route to function simultaneously. This optimizes material flow and improves productivity.”

For video footage of the Agile F24 line, go here.

The new system layout is based on an XTS with a circumferential track length of 22 meters and with 40 movers as its core element. The various stations for filling the foundation containers are arranged along the intelligent transport system. The filling process includes six work steps: infeed of the bottles, filling, adding dispenser pumps, adding caps, labeling, and outfeed of the finished products.

Infeed occurs via a handling robot that, like other robots in the sophisticated line, is a Fanuc robot. It takes two or three empty bottles from a tray and places them into transport pucks fastened on the movers. In the following stations, robots or handling systems fill the bottles, insert dispenser pumps or droppers (depending on the product), screw them on, and place a cap on top. The Agile F24 line employs a total of 39 AM8000 series servomotors from Beckhoff, here in a handling station that closes the bottles.The Agile F24 line employs a total of 39 AM8000 series servomotors from Beckhoff, here in a handling station that closes the bottles.Next, a laser code with the product color, lot number, and expiration ate is printed on the bottle and a label is applied. At the end of the XTS circuit, the filled bottles are placed onto trays and forwarded to a cartoner.

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