Butler Automatic

executions, production downtime, delays and waste would be a thing of the past. Butler Automatic sees that world as being well within reach. “Our overall goal is to eliminate all downtime in the operation of a machine due to roll change operations,” says Johns. “Our objective is primarily to make the machines that we operate with, more efficient, and to give them higher output. What we want is to make those machines as easy to use and as automatic and automatable as possible. Whether it’s in three, five or even ten years down the road, it would be nice if the operator had to do 10 percent of what they do today to execute a roll change on one of those pouching lines.” says Johns. “We’ve improved the human-machine interface (HMI) to be more logical and more easily read by operators. We’ve set up failure analysis and failure correction screens with the HMI and within the software that allow operators to evaluate failures live and onsite. We take advantage of sensor improvements as they become available, making our sensors better at detecting differences in the properties of the films that our end- users are using. We are implementing ease of use, performance, and reliability improvements on an ongoing basis. In terms of new products, we’ve been working very closely with a few of the original equipment manufacturers to fully incorporate splicing technology into their larger pouching machines. The splicing on these new machines would be an integrated capability, not just an option. That’s been very successful at providing the end-user the splicing function with no extra footprint and, in some cases, no extra cost.” In an ideal world of perfect packaging line PREFERRED VENDOR n FESTO www.festo.com