To speed up production lines, many manufacturers employ parallel stations at one or more steps in the process. This approach allows faster processing than a strictly linear configuration, but there is a commonly overlooked inefficiency on these production lines: the system used to transfer the products from a mass flow to the parallel stations.
The current solution in most plants is a metering system in which products move along a conveyor, stopping at each station in turn until they find an open one. This is equivalent to driving down a street and hitting a red light at every intersection—eventually, you’ll get where you’re going, but it can take a long time. In addition, if one of the parallel processing machines goes down, it results in the stoppage of the entire line, like a red light that never turns green.
Garvey Accumulators and Conveyors' new solution, which was debuted during PACK EXPO Las Vegas, turns that street into a superhighway. By leveraging our patented accumulation technology, we’ve developed a new on-demand distribution system that transfers products from a mass flow to parallel stations with no stopping, no waiting, and no downtime.
