Tag: Quality Control

The Social Push

Written on by frain-sales

With a tremendous rise in social media, companies, sectors, groups, individuals, etc. have been “exposed”.  Customers are not only expressing their likes/dislikes to the manufacturer. They are using public displays and online interaction to express concern, dejection, amazement or favoritism toward a brand, product, person and everything in between.

For example, a loyal customer shared her disgust of a cosmetic product over social media and even directly to the founder of the company: “So,,, I hit pan on my @JeffreeStar highlight and found HAIR embedded into it.” Another shared disbelief and difficulty supporting a product: “Your beef is frozen and we all know it. Y’all know we laugh at your slogan ‘fresh, never frozen’ right? Like you’re really a joke.”

As a result to public complaints, many companies have directly pushed for transparency and optimization of quality to improve their products.

Some companies turned to Frain for the automation of their production lines by using robots, detection technology or equipment that decreased the number of operators to reduce human error. Customers selected from a wide variety of packaging and processing equipment to convert to a semi-automatic or automatic process to enrich production lines and quality control.

Whether you prefer data collection/analyzation or a combination of both automation and data, Frain has the equipment needed for a seamless transition. Our technicians, mechanics, and engineers are dedicated to your equipment goals and integration requirements.

Let Frain help you like it has helped other companies.

Aesops Fables – Tortoise and the Hare

Written on by John Henry

Most of us, when we were young’uns, heard Aesop’s fables. Perhaps the best known is the story of the turtle and the hare: One day they decide to have a race. The hare is pretty fast and does not view the turtle as much of a challenge. He takes off but then stops along the way for a beer or two, runs fast for a bit more than has some lunch and so on. The turtle is a lot slower but is steady. In the end, the slow but steady turtle wins the race.

Packaging lines are like that sometimes. We think that running them faster will result in more output. Sometimes it does but sometimes we get the opposite.

Years ago I was a young maintenance manager in a pharmaceutical plant. One of the products was a suppository that was strip packed between two foil laminates. It was not a terribly sophisticated process and the strip packing machine was supposed to run at 60ppm. At least that is what the manual said.

When we ran it at 60ppm, there were about 25% rejects. Some of this was crushing the suppository between the jaws, some was the laminate not sealing correctly some was due to other issues.

Through trial and error when the packaging manager was not looking I found that we could almost completely eliminate the rejects by slowing the machine from 60ppm to 50ppm.

As soon as I would leave, and the packaging manager would find that I had slowed down his machine, he would crank the speed back up to 60ppm. Rejects went up as well.

Running at 60ppm with 25% rejects, meant a true output of 45 good products per minute. When the loss from damaged product and the time to rework leaking packages are included, it is considerably less. Over a 420 minute shift, it would produce 18,900 good products.

Running at 50ppm with 3% rejects true output is 48.5ppm or 20,370 good products for the shift.

I never could get the packaging manager to understand this:

Sometimes you just have to slow down to go fast.