In an effort to save on costs and increase production, an Australian dairy producer contacted HMPS to design and manufacture a new ‘pick and place’ crate packer to accommodate its changing business needs. The customer had an existing drop crate packer that lost it approximately 40% in line efficiency. The dairy had traditionally used plastic bottles to pack its milk, but had recently moved over to a thinner plastic in a bid to not only reduce costs, but also to keep in line with its environmental objectives.
To accommodate bounce and product instability, the management of the product had to be carefully considered, as well as accommodating for the thinner packaging material. HMPS realised that a machine that picked and placed bottles from as little as 50mm into the crate was necessary, and its HMPS 7000 – a ‘pick and place’ crate packer designed to receive, collate and ‘pick and place’ two and three-litre bottles into two crates per cycle before moving the completed crates onto a transfer conveyor – was the perfect solution.
The company says this was its first crate packer design, and the speed and efficiency of the machine has been of great interest to the packaging industry. “The new machine packs double the volume of the old machine for this particular customer, and we anticipate a nationwide roll-out of the new technology,” the company says. HMPS is a wholly owned Australian company specialising in the design, development and manufacturing of high quality machinery for packaging processes.
Starting out as a result of the key wine industry in South Australia, the company designed and developed the first Bag in Box machinery back in the 1980s and has since grown to offer case packers, RSC, palletisers, carton erectors and sealers, pick and place applications and specialised robotic solutions. HMPS machinery is exported to Asia, South Africa, New Zealand, Europe and the USA.
