Yamato Corporation

Commercial and Industrial Weighing Scales and Systems

4 Preventive Maintenance Tips to Keep Your Food Packaging Line Running Smoothly

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Between smoke breaks and tired employees, you could be losing a lot of productivity without realizing it.

One of the ways you can lessen your downtime is by implementing preventive maintenance strategies. When you perform preventative efforts, you ensure that you’re one step ahead of any problems.

Here are four tips you can use to ensure your food packaging line runs like clockwork.

Vaccuum packs of carrots on a food packaging line

1. Focus on Communication

When you’re putting together a maintenance program for your packaging line, you need to streamline communication. Maintenance is everyone’s least favorite aspect of a job, but if you divvy up the work and communicate clearly, you can get it done painlessly.

Our suggestions:

  • Schedule a meeting to plan and delegate tasks for preventative maintenance. Rotate these tasks via a schedule so that you can ensure that everyone gets a full 360-degree view of your line.
  • Integrate all your teams and be sure to address their concerns to reduce losses and errors. Hiccups can stop the whole line and cost you money in lost labor and productivity.
  • Take the time to review your previous year or quarter’s issues during your meetings, and make sure all voices get heard.

2. Make Time for Planning

You know the importance of setting goals and targets for productivity, but you should have the same kind of targets for maintenance. When you perform corrective repair and maintenance that aims at preventing issues, you can keep your promises.

Your schedule matters to your employees, your supervisors, and your customers. When you make time for planning, you make sure you always hit your goals in the time that you promised.

Document your actual downtimes and compare them to what you projected. This helps with future planning.

3. Get Strong Metrics

When you’re maintaining on a regular schedule, you’ll end up with measurable results that can describe your execution levels and how you succeeded. When you track your maintenance-related metrics, you’ll get a feel for how you can improve your efficiency.

Things to keep in mind:

  • Maintenance will always yield a result, one way or another. It should let you know over time how long it usually takes before you need maintenance somewhere on your line.
  • If you see persistent issues, you can figure out where you can improve your efficiency and make an action plan for the future.
  • You can continually improve as you learn more about how your line works and where it malfunctions.

4. Figure Out Integration

When you integrate your operations and maintenance data, you can figure out how to improve performance. You need to put formal processes in place so both new and older employees are working under the same conditions.

Because you can’t predict when things will break down on your line, you also need your entire team to be able to plan how maintenance will impact them. Productivity could drop and you need to be prepared for that.

Preventive Maintenance Is like Preventative Medicine

Just as preventative medicine aims to treat illnesses before they worsen, preventive maintenance helps you see problems before they get bigger. Large problems in a workplace can lead to lost profits, low morale, and customers not getting the service they expect.

If you want to learn more about how the latest food packaging equipment on the market can keep your food packaging line moving smoothly, check out our guide.

An Introductory Guide to the World of Checkweighing

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Are you familiar with the world of checkweighing?

If not, you’re missing out on a valuable quality-control tool for your business. But before you recognize the benefits and uses of checkweighing, it’s important to understand how using a checkweigher works.

What Is Checkweighing?

Simply put, a checkweigher is a machine that weighs items as they move through a production line. It then sorts items by preset weight zones, rejecting items that don’t fit into these predetermined zones. This process is much more efficient than randomly quality checking items by hand.

Checkweighing machines come in a variety of different sizes and can weight just about anything, from a bag of potato chips to a large semi-truck. So, no matter what your business produces, a weigher should be the final step in your process.

A checkweigher is a lot like a traffic cop for your assembly line. It’s there to call out mistakes and ensure that your product is ready to hit the market. In fact, without a weigher, many mistakes made in assembly wouldn’t be caught.

Benefits of Using a Checkweigher

Checkweighing has many different benefits, but those benefits depend on the industry in which it’s used and how it’s used.

Compliance

One of the main applications for a checkweigher is compliance. Compliance means different things to different industries, but, for most food manufacturers, checkweighers are used to ensure the reporting standards for the USDA, FDA, and other agencies are met.

They’re also used to meet net contents laws for pre-packaged goods. This is especially important if you produce food, since one surefire what to make customers angry is to give them less than they pay for.

Checking for Completeness

The purpose of a checkweigher is to catch mistakes in your product and product packaging before they get to the consumer.

Checking for completeness is just one way that a checkweigher makes sure your product is high quality. A checkweigher can also call out if something is missing a part or if something extra has been added.

If you’re a potato chip manufacturer, for example, checkweighing can verify counts by weighing how much is in a package. Not only does this reduce waste and mistakes, it can save you money by making sure nothing is too full.

Efficiency Reporting

How quickly and efficiently is your assembly line working? A checkweigher can tell you. If products are routinely coming up under or overweight, a part of your assembly line might not be working properly.

Removing Human Error

Employees can’t always catch every item that doesn’t meet standards, but a checkweighing machine can. As we mentioned earlier, using a checkweigher prevents human error by removing items that don’t fit into your predetermined weight zones.

Want to Learn More?

If you’d like to learn more about what a checkweigher can accomplish, visit our website. Yamato offers high-quality weighing equipment for industrial and commercial markets.

And remember: Checkweighers have many more uses than the ones we listed above. If your industry requires giving  or preparing specific items at specific weights, checkweighing your products is a great way to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and increase compliance.

Contact us today to learn more!

Should You Invest in a Packaging Machine?

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If you’re like most small business owners, you research ways to grow your business. That means you’ve probably come across all sorts of information about ways you can use machinery to package your products.

For many businesses, automating your packaging process makes sense. This is probably why the amount of US products packaged using automatic packaging machines has trended higher and higher since 2009.

Unfortunately, investing in packaging equipment is not cheap. In fact, a packaging machine setup could cost anywhere from a couple hundred thousand dollars to over a million depending on the size of your business, your products, and your needs.

So, how do you know if it’s the right time for your company to make a huge investment like that? Read on to find out.

The Yamato Omega combination checkweighing food packing system

Why Investing in a Packaging Machine Often Make Sense

They Reduce Overhead Expenses

One of the biggest things a packing machine can do for your company is reduce overhead expenses. Not only can it cut your labor costs, but manufacturers often see reductions in energy consumption because a machine is more efficient than humans.

Of course, if you prefer to have some human oversight, there are also semi-automatic packing machines available. These give you the best of both worlds: the efficiency of a machine and the problem-solving abilities of a human.

Another expense you should see cut when you automate is in waste production. Not only does it cost less to dispose of fewer waste products, but it makes your company more eco-friendly too.

A Packaging Machine Can Increase Production

For many manufacturers, automating their processes make sense because machines offer benefits that humans cannot. For instance:

  • Machines do not require benefits or sick leave.
  • A machine can work faster and make fewer errors than a human. Fewer errors means less waste.
  • Machines are versatile. There are all kinds of packing machines available to suit the needs of businesses in all kinds of markets. From candy and confections to fruit and deli products, there is a packing machine that can handle your needs.

Give Us a Call

Between the efficiency benefits, labor benefits, and tax incentives, it’s almost always a good time to automate your food packaging. And don’t forget: Even if you don’t, your competitors still may, which means they’ll enjoy the savings and increased efficiency while you don’t.

If you’re ready to upgrade your packaging technology or if you have questions about how our equipment can help you, contact us today. We’re eager to answer your questions and show you what we have to offer.