At its Beaucaire site in southern France, Bacardi-Martini had been running six bottling lines for twenty years, in order to produce twenty different products in twenty-four glass bottle formats, from 200 ml to 2 litres. The company prepares and bottles vodka, tequila, liqueurs and vermouths on the site. The Beaucaire plant had a lot of history, but needed to increase its productivity, increasing both speed and flexibility to meet modern demands.
So Bacardi-Martini asked Gebo Cermex to respond.
Gebo Cermex brought to the job its engineering expertise in packaging lines, supply of packaging machines and integration of complementary systems selected from other equipment suppliers. This resulted in the establishment of two high performance bottling lines in place of the six previous ones, and production reorganisation to combine best cost, speed and flexibility, overall and at each stage of the bottling process.
Gebo Cermex achieved bacardi's requirements:
- By abandoning an approach based on lines dedicated to brands or product types.
- By maintaining a maximum of equipment from the old configuration in order to remain competitive.
- By installing new machines where necessary to handle the dual requirement of high speed and high flexibility: robotic case packer or labeller with optical orientation, for example.
- By coming up with innovative solutions to facilitate circulation of flows, improve operator ergonomics and optimise format changeover times.
The solution proposed by the Gebo Cermex team made it possible to switch from six to two lines by specialising the lines, with a high-speed line for large production runs and a high-flexibility line for small and medium sized ones. The enhanced productivity target was achieved because the reduction in the number of lines was accompanied by an increase in the number of bottles produced per minute on the site.
Olivier Goffin, director of the beer, wine and spirits market at Gebo Cermex, explained, "We worked on optimising the efficiency and reliability of the site while reducing floor space, which improves the circulation of people and product flows. It was by reasoning according to the length of the production run, and no longer according to the brand, that we were able to achieve this result, which enables smoother production with far fewer downtimes".
Conveying and management of accumulation are performed by Gebo conveyors and accumulation tables. Each unit is connected to a modular central architecture which groups together all parameters and manages the interactions between equipment. Line 1 is equipped with a pressureless combiner which operates at up to 300 bottles per minute. Line 2, which is high flexible, allows units to enter the line without applying pressure at a rate of 150 bottles per hour.
To manage the speed of line 1 and the flexibility of line 2, a Cermex "AN" Pick & Place case packing robot was installed. At each cycle, the numerical axis gantry grabs thirty-six bottles with its customised gripping head and places them six per case in six cases simultaneously, while protecting the products and labels at all times. When a new bottle format requires a change of grippers, just fifteen minutes is needed to reposition/replace them and restart the line.
Upstream from the robotic case packer, an F3 case erector positively forms the case with pre-opening ofthe outer flaps for guaranteed efficiency and squareness. Downstream, the Cermex C6 case gluer seals the top flaps of the case using hot-melt glue. An inkjet printer then applies the barcode and the boxes are conveyed by a spiral elevator to the palletizer. These two items of equipment were included in the Gebo Cermex service supply.
A Gebo EIT (Efficiency Improvement Tool) was installed. This is a modular and scalable system to collect real-time operational information on each of the line's components. It enables operators to identify the primary causes of the stoppages on both lines and, more generally, facilitates implementation of action plans for increasing their efficiency.
Much of the equipment being operated on pre-existing lines was retained and reinstalled on the two new lines.
Mario Trigueiro, Gebo sales engineer for the Beaucaire site, noted, "Our approach was intended to be highly pragmatic, taking into account the expectations of speed and flexibility along with the desire to retain and reuse as much of the existing equipment as possible in order to comply with the budgetary framework. The overall layout of lines to factor in the constraints of the existing site was another strong point in the Gebo Cermex approach.”
The effectiveness Gebo Cermex' solution also stems from the fact that two filling machines were positioned on each line. Vermouths and Get are products which require a lengthy machine cleaning and sterilizing process. For this essential operation to be performed in hidden time without blocking the line, the second filling machine takes over when the recipe is changed.
