How Robotics in Packaging Can Increase Operations

This is up. Time with Douglas for over 55 years, Douglas has provided customers with high quality automated packaging solutions for paperboard, corrugated and shrink film. Join us as we talk with the experts and dive into the challenges and solutions faced by customers in the secondary packaging industry. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of uptime, a Douglas machine podcast I'm your host, Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B. And folks, Thanks for joining us on another episode. Great to have you listening along for some more thought. Leadership out of Douglas machine. As you're listening along, make sure that you're subscribing to uptime on Apple Podcasts and Spotify for a full catalog of previous episodes as well as notifications when we drop new ones. And also make sure that you're going to our website. Douglas machine dotcom. Again, Douglas machine for more information on our secondary packaging solutions, as well as more uptime and other Douglas machine content. So on today's episode of the podcast, we're getting a State of the Union on the secondary packaging equipment industry. And more specifically, how the most recent COVID related pain points, but also broader trends that we were already feeling in the industry are impacting packaging equipment needs. We're going to really break down the full timeline and understand point by what those needs are and potentially how to solve them. So for insights today, we're joined by Steve lipps, senior director of product management for Douglas machine, Inc. Steve, great to have you on. How are you doing? Great to be here. Thank you very well. Yeah pleasure again to chat today. Looking forward to sourcing your thoughts here today. I want to start by highlighting your career in the industry because I think it frames the conversation and your perspective. Well, so you have over 25 years of experience in technical sales and marketing roles within the packaging equipment industry. So in that career timeline, how have you seen the macro trends of the industry evolved? Know what have they shaped the most and why? I guess if I was to start and summarize, I'd look at the macro trend being just the balance that our customers have had to play between the mass market. And then the new and expanding numbers of segments in the market. I think in terms of both on the consumer side serving the mass market of consumers, but also niches within that also applies to retailers and distribution of their products and how that's changed along with the products themselves as opposed to expand further. Know, I look at the first trend that I've seen is on the consumer side, just kind of expanding and changing market of consumers. If I look at packaged good producers who are the customers that we serve the most, we refer to them as CPG companies and the packaging industry. Consumers have certainly changed both in volume. That's really driven our customers to focus on optimizing higher speeds, more throughput, that aspect of their production cycle. So that's been driven by volume. But then at the same time, you've had all these changes in what consumers want and how many variations of what they want. There are in the market. That's been a conflict because of running the same thing. And producing the same product all day is very efficient and very effective. But with everything from a number of different demographic groups that are out there and people wanting to try new and different products, that really puts pressures on our customers who are producing products and how to keep their operations effectively. I look at the beer industry, the shift from big national brands in the beer industry to now we're looking at craft Brewers and even microbrewers that are in the industry and having an impact on the brewing industry overall, even though that's fairly recent. If you even look at it today, that's already starting to plateau, and you're seeing new products come out with hard seltzer's and health drinks that are greatly affecting what the beverage market looks like overall. So when you start getting into packaging equipment, the equipment needs have had to parallel both of those trends on the consumer side and help our customers meet opportunities in the market and expand further to the other subset of that is the retailers retail distribution channels for food and beverage, which is probably 80% of what we do, has also been a big macro trend in the market. The diversity of retailers and how they serve the market is very start with the regional, local grocers and then progressively we've added Walmart and Sam's club, Costco, thousands of dollars stores there on every corner. These days, all the convenience stores are revamping what they're doing. Even home improvement stores sell food and beverage products. All of this is driving food producers to. Produce different packs at these different outlets are demanding, certainly put a lot of pressures on them. So we talk in terms of how flexible can equipment be, what capabilities can it doesn't have to produce different packs and do it simply. All of these different retail and outlet channels want different products. They want unique products. They want them packaged in certain ways. They want to hit different price points, which is really putting pressures on the consumer packaged good producers. Third macro trend I'd point to is workforce demographics. If you look at the workforce generally, there's less amount of labor available and there's less skilled labor available in many areas. And that's affecting the baseline operations of our customers, their ability of their maintenance staff, the capabilities of their operators, the numbers of those that they're able to obtain. Even on the project engineering side, the availability of project engineers to implement new lines and increase production for the consumers. All those have pressures based on the workforce. Everybody's everybody's being asked to do more with less. Now, how have you seen those macro trends impact your customers specific needs both day to day and also long term strategy needs? I think long term and day to day, it's to me, it feels like an effort to control the chaos. You know, really great pressures that they have on what needs to be produced while at the same time, keeping production simple enough that they can be effective and be profitable as producers that are serving the customers in the market. So that's changed. They've had to kind of provide that balance between maintaining high throughput and high speeds in the efficiencies to serve the mass market, but then doing things like investing machine that have high speed capabilities, but then also maybe have that little additional flexibility they need to serve a new and upcoming segment. We've also had customers that have had to have secondary packaging operations offline from their main production flow to address certain niches in the market. That type of thing can affect the types of automation and the breadth of automation that our customers are looking for high speed, highly efficient automation on one end and highly flexible automation or simpler automation at the other. So those are factors that are affecting our customers. When you pull in the workforce challenges on top of all this, it. That's really been the umbrella of factor that's impacted by all of these needs and opportunities in the market, as do our customers, how the staff are able to execute and perform and produce the products needed. So they're really struggling in those areas on how to keep their workforce productive. Now, of course, we have to talk a little bit about the impacts of COVID. It's really the unavoidable elephant in the room. Right so when we bring it even more recently to a COVID context, how is the industry had to adapt to increased demand as well as safety concerns, not only for consumers, but in my opinion, even more importantly, for workers in the space as well? Yeah, as I put it, in the category of accelerating all current trends that are out there. A big portion of the outlet for our customers is through retail and distribution channels that serve customers at home, food and beverage being a significant part of it. But our customers have the maybe food service side of their businesses, which are generally down those that are providing products to restaurants, for example. However, on the retail side, for things that customers purchase and bring home for use, those demands have just accelerated and have been blown out of the water. So it's those certainly put stresses on, again, what type of flexibility do they have in their operation to not only serve all these different markets and new products that are in the market, but be able to do it even faster. And at higher volumes than they've had to do it in the past to meet the demands because of COVID. Daniel, I think you asked a question on the safety side of things also for personnel. I look at that and everybody is facing scenarios where they're trying to keep their employees safe. So they're testing employees. The employees have symptoms. They're being removed and isolated for periods of time. So that that that, again, has more impact on their workforce. I kind of mentioned doing more with less to some degree. Kovr-tv has caused less resources to be available. But but like we talked about, the demand is even higher. So that's really been a big impact overall from the packaging equipment industry standpoint. We've always, and have recently started thinking about it in terms of simplicity for our customers. Simplicity has been a key factor in overall productivity of personnel and the production lines that they maintain and operate. It becomes a baseline of whether equipment in lines can run efficiently. And certainly, as you talk about COVID and just the pressures that it's put on the workforce, simplicity again becomes a factor in how well, that workforce is able to perform. Now, I'm sure you speak with plenty of customers in the fulfillment and just broader shipping industries on their day to days to understand how these changes are reaching them individually. Do you have any anecdotes that you can pull from to ground. These shifts in the packaging industries and just packaging workflows, anything that highlights kind of what we've been talking about? One way I could do that is. We've been conducting customer interviews in a fairly structured manner, and we refer to it as Douglas discovery, really seeking out to get feedback directly from customers on pain points and things that they need within their operations and things that they would like to see. A couple of the antidotes were actually there. Kind of interesting the way customers talk about what they need. One comment a customer made is people always talk about change over changing over a machine to run a different product. And and I want to be able to change from recipe one to recipe to and optimizing that. That's kind of been the common effort that machine producers have been trying to provide our customers. This customer took it even further. They said, not only do I need a machine that's going to change over fast between recipe one, recipe two, but I need a machine that I can set up a brand new recipe of something I've never run before. And I need to be able to do that quickly in another example, the customer talked about kind of the challenge of keeping personnel and they talked about training sessions. They said, well, the value of bringing a group into a conference room to conduct training sessions has really been reduced because of the turnover of labor based on its limited availability. Training operators in a conference room could create a situation where that training is obsolete within a month or two of personal leave. So their comment was along the lines of needing machines that either don't require or training at all, or the machines have the simplicity and ability to provide training on the fly. All right, let's go ahead and bring Douglas machine more intently into the conversation here. Can we talk a bit about the company's approach to innovation around packaging equipment? And more specifically, how has Douglas balanced both simplicity and complexity in its designs to best meet all of these packaging needs, both short term COVID ones, whether that is in safety or increased demand in the fulfillment side of the packaging industries all the way to these long term macro trends, you broke down as well. Where does Douglas intersect in its designs and why? One area is just a portfolio breadth that we have. We've increased our portfolio to cover a broader range of applications all the way from high end, high throughput needs to other applications that are built more for flexibility. We've also invested specifically and heavily in ways to make machines simpler. Robotics is a tool that builders like us can use to make machines that have additional capabilities within the machine. But those there's commercial robots that are provided by suppliers, and we've employed those at times. But we ran into limitations where robots weren't able to be applied either cost effectively or based on their format and footprint. They have the complexity of needing additional control panels to run each individual robot. And it just became a limiter to the opportunity we saw to simplify machines further than anybody's simplified machines before. So we've invested in what I like to refer to as a purpose built robot. Robots specifically built for a purpose to replace, call it more complicated mechanisms in the machine, just to greatly simplify the machine overall, both in how it looks and feels to an operator based on reducing the number of parts in the machine to reducing the amount of maintenance and a machine control system. I mentioned for commercial robotics needing their own control panels. We've simplified that and developed robots that allow us to use the same Rockwell logic's controllers that we use in our machines today, the same servo drives that we use in our machines today that customers are comfortable with maintaining. So that's provided simplicity. In one example, in one of our case, packing machines, we've taken as much as 40% of the parts out of the machine. So that becomes 40% fewer parts to for maintenance people to have to clean, for maintenance, people to have to maintain reducing the number of lubrication points to simplify that for maintenance personnel, just to take less time and give those personnel time to do other things. They need to be doing. That same machine also helps operators with changeover. We eliminated or automated 40% of the change points. So the operators have less to do when they're changing from a recipe to one to recipe to. And we're doing that as a standard on that case backor. That's that's our SAP one model case factor that we've introduced about a year and a half ago. Maybe so we can nerd out on the technical side of things a little bit. What are some of these specific technical decisions, manufacturing decisions that enable this solution to meet those needs? Any any specs that you can share? I think the specs from the if I put it in customer terms, it's give us something that just works. Give us something that goes into a machine that's intuitive for our operators to run as intuitive as possible, for operators to run. That's in terms of maintenance. Again And the maintenance make the maintenance is intuitive and simple as possible by bringing points of maintenance closer to the edges of the machine that are more visible for maintenance people to see what needs to be done and how that gets done. That's kind of the specification from the customer side, that it's been the focus on our efforts to simplify machines. Overall, robotics are also commonly known to need special programming. So that can be scary because that speaks to complexity, not simplicity. But we've been able to take robotics and drive a lot of the robotic motions with parameters that are common to our customers. Shanghai, the package. By entering the size of the package, the motion of the robot is calculated and automatically performed again, simplifying things for them, allowing them to set up new recipes and be more flexible with their operations. Do you have any examples of how this Douglas machine technology is being put to best use in the industry today? Any other anecdotes, either from your clients or otherwise? Some of the latest technologies we've had are relatively new, so those pieces of equipment are in process or recently installed. The feedback. We're getting is, is what we wanted to achieve with those objectives. It's boils down to the performance of the machine, the simplicity of the machine, and then value, making sure that the machine is at a value that provides best justification for the customer. Overall, customers use a term often referred to asset utilization, ties heavily to the efficiency of the machine, advertise heavily to how much uptime the machine has, doing things like minimizing maintenance, minimizing change. Over time, those factors can really increase asset utilization. Simplicity of the machine. How easy is it for the operator to understand where intervention is needed and the ability to physically access the machine to do that? All of those factors are increasing asset utilization with some of the technologies and innovations supporting that. All right. To close the conversation. And we still have a little bit here to unpack. But just last main set of questions. I want to ask you is if you could help us break down some of the more specific ways that maximizing simplicity and time in packaging technologies can address a variety of the industry's current need. So I'm going to go down the list here a minute, point a few of the key ones out, and then if you could just share some of the ways that you see this technology that maximizes simplicity and time addressing these needs. So we'll start with the workforce skills gap. This is something that has become an issue in many industries. And so I'd like to learn a little bit more about how this is manifesting in the fulfillment and shipping side of the packaging and retail industries and where this technology meet those needs. Yeah, speaking of workforce skills gap, I'd point to a couple of areas, one is a less tangible item, but being in the equipment industry, when you walk up to a machine, some machines are just evidentally simpler. You walk up to them and they just look less complex, you can see what's going on, you can understand how the machine is operating just by visually being able to see what's going on inside of it and how the machine looks and feels. That is a less tangible factor, but a big one with new operators coming on board at our customer locations and their customers needing those operators to be effective quickly, the ability of a machine not to quite honestly scare a new operator or a new employee to make them feel more comfortable in operating the machine is a big benefit when it comes to workforce skills gap. This next 1 May seem pretty straightforward, but getting a more detailed answer. I think would be good for our listening audience. How does this technology help meet the needs of productivity on the work floor? Obviously, when something is maximizing both simplicity of use and the time it takes to use it, you would imagine that productivity is one of the first metrics that can improve. But can you give us a more detailed answer as to why and how? Yeah, no. I think you're right to acknowledge that productivity does include that combination of how productive are the employees that are operating online. It also speaks to how reliable is the equipment. And certainly through experience, machines that have fewer components tend to be more reliable. If you go back 20 years and you looked at machines that had mechanical cams and lots of linkages to have them operate, their reliability and efficiency would decrease over time as the machine wore just because there were so many components to wear with later designs. Now that we've been able to reduce a significant number of components in the machine, that reduces maintenance, reduces failures, which overall increases productivity. What about in terms of asset utilization? Where does this simple and time maximizing technology impact asset utilization in the packaging space? They talked about asset utilization being that combination of efficiencies over all of the machine while it's running, but also uptime of the machine overall. So asset utilization speaks to that whole umbrella of minimizing stoppages. Minimizing the time to recover, if you do have a stoppage, certainly plays into a part changeover, plays a part into asset utilization. How quickly can you change over and get back online, and how accurate is that changeover? When we were earlier talked about eliminating or automating change points as a standard on one of our latest case factor designs, sometimes you have to look at the time that saved by an operator not having to make that change. But if you have newer operators and they're less experienced, so they happen to make a mistake on a changeover and it takes that can be complex and take time to diagnose. So something that should be a 1 minute change over item can quickly and suddenly become 10 minutes of lost production time while you try to diagnose what's wrong. So all of those factors feed into asset utilization overall. What about in terms of machine flexibility? Is there anything that Douglas machine does with their packaging technologies and equipment that just naturally makes them more flexible as solutions? And what kind of impact does that have when you speak in terms of flexibility? That's often first and foremost a conversation between the customer and ourselves and trying to understand what the customer's needs are for flexibility. There's a high element of our designs and the equipment that could supply that are adapted and applied and designed for, you know, the range of what the customer might have to do. So that partnership is a key driver in flexibility. Another one would be for a reference in another design, we have where it's another innovative design that effectively combines grouping the products into a correlation pattern and loading the products into a case into one mechanism. Completely eliminating what would typically be an infield section of a machine. It's also a robotic based, designed and get a purpose built robot that we have that uses standard controls that our customers prefer to use every day, but that designs one way that a machine provides flexibility by just eliminating an entire section of the machine, which takes away the complexity of having to design a more mechanized machine that you'd either couldn't run a particular application. The customer may want to run or would require modifications or changes to be able to run a new product. So there's a really unique technology. And that's I'm referring to our drive excel, which is a retail ready, shelf Ready K parking solution. That really provides a flexibility for our customers, has been quite successful in that area, just a few more. I want to get your thoughts on Steve. How does maximizing simplicity in time and packaging technology address change over capabilities as well? Many intersections there to comment on. Yes, definitely directly changeover is a big deal for customers. They can be complex. They can take time. Mistakes that are made can cause inefficiencies as things get started up on a line, kind of break it down and to eliminate if you can eliminate a change point, that's the ultimate. We've made steps in eliminating change points through designs using the design that I mentioned previously, on the drive excel, completely eliminating an enemy that eliminates and minimized change over items automating and changeover. We've found the ability to automate changeover points on elements of our machine where it cost effectively reduces the mechanisms needed to mechanically make the changeover, manually make the changeover. So that's a win-win for us being able to supply a customer at a better price point. And at the same time giving the customer the benefit of not having to touch that change point. Another comes down to change over accuracy, linear adjustments, things that are on slots and people adjust to a pointer location. Those are common, but often difficult to really make accurate. We're working on solutions that are able to put numeric values to those linear adjustments and be able to provide those back to the HMG for verification. You know, when you think in terms of change over. Five minutes of change over savings, if you equate that on a per shift basis, no change over basis over a year's period of time, you can be talking about hundreds of thousands of extra units going out the door based on saving five minutes on a particular change over. Really, really large impacts in that area. Now, how about in terms of accessibility of the machines, specifically accessibility of the machines for the workers that will be interacting with said equipment day in and day out? Any intersections there? Accessibility can directly feed to asset utilization. Accessibility is both visual and physical, even from a visual standpoint. Clean sight lines into the machine and just some of these come down to the awareness of the designers and the thought that they put into the design in terms of accessibility while they do the design work. How do you make our doors that don't have free members and interferences that avoid sight lines lining up for members of the machine. So that they enable access into specific areas? All of those elements become aspects of accessibility into a machine that help operators and maintenance personnel both. We also have to keep in mind that operators that operate equipment are not all six foot, six tall. You have operators that are five feet tall and 90 pounds. So how we design access to a garage doors, provisions within the machine to provide access to the full range of operators come into play in our thoughts while we design on top of all of this. There's also the factors of ergonomics, safety and sanitation, or maybe just more generally maintenance of said machines. Can you give some thoughts on that and how a piece of equipment that maximizes simplicity and ease of use and speed of use makes the ergonomics, the safety and the maintenance or broader sanitation of the machine more easy? It could be a bit of a beneficial snowball or it just builds and builds on itself overall. So if the design incorporates fewer components, it automatically becomes easier to clean because there's less difficulty. It could be safer with better access in that people aren't reaching into areas of the machine that might be confined. So by providing more accessibility, safety is provided. Safety, for the most part, is also a given that safety has to come first. All the regulations and requirements on safety and how the machine is built have to be into consideration for safety. Ergonomics certainly also comes into play at times directly to accessibility and accessibility in a way that simplifies things for the operator setting up material provisions. So that materials, inputs that are going into the machine, such as case materials or shrink film materials, Carton's, those types of things that we're providing is ergonomics of access to supply those materials into the machine. And finally, Steve, how about for the maintainability of the machine? So, you know, day to day usage and therefore longevity of these machines, how does it intersect with the component reduction and reliability aspects of that maintainability of a packaging equipment technology? Yeah, I was kind of interesting stories at a customer site a few months back, and they were talking about their effort. They put into maintainability and the machines and they went through a process of, I guess, for lack of a better explanation, auto detailing their machines. They cleaned them to the point where they were spotless. They added lighting inside the machine for visibility. So that if a drop of oil showed up on the floor of the machine, that lighting would show it really a strong effort towards providing the machine that's clean to start with. And as a result, it provides a baseline where if there's variances from that, they can identify it and identify where the machine might need to be maintained on the machine design. Some of the same comes into play. By reducing components, you reduce what needs to be maintained. That's that's a first step. And maintenances is to eliminate. We have considerations on designing auto tensioning type mechanisms and devices. So things that maintenance historically would have to say, tweak and adjust to get to operate properly consideration for how do we design that out. So that it's automatically done for them. And they don't have to do it themselves. All those items drive into reliability, providing mechanisms that either eliminate adjustments or eliminate the tweaking and tuning or automatically align themselves and tune themselves to be able to run. Now, I could point to one of our machine platforms as a shrink platform and the we worked on a mechanism that cuts film before it applies it onto the package for shrinkwrap. And that couteur design itself was designed with this in mind, auto adjustment of drive tensions. So that the tension doesn't either get too loose or too tight and impact the reliability of that. Opponent tracking mechanisms that track belts and make sure that they are, where they need to be. So they don't track incorrectly and cause down downtime an additional mainard. So really from top to bottom, incorporated into our design thought process overall and taking direct steps to provide real, tangible benefits for the customer. All right, Steve lipps, that about wraps up our conversation for the day. Any final thoughts here on how these secondary packaging equipment industry is looking going into twenty, 21 and just any final pieces of advice or areas where our listening audience should be focusing as we move into next year? Certainly a challenging and exciting time. Govan's applied some challenges and the demands are up on everywhere from the consumer through to the packaging equipment providers. Definitely there's opportunity in the market for everybody. And really excited to be a part of it. Strides we're making in addressing the opportunities in the market to address the needs of the customers are what we're striving to do and making great strides on. So I decided to be part of it. Really, really. I'm excited to be a part of it. All right, Steve lippe, senior director of product management for Douglas machine, inc., thank you so much for joining us and giving us your thoughts today on the podcast. It's really been a pleasure. And I'm looking forward to chatting with you again soon. Thanks again. Thank you, Danny. And real quick before we let you go, Steve, if folks want to find out more about the work that you're doing with Douglas machine or potentially get in touch for any reason, how can they do so? They could do so by working through our website at Douglas machine dotcom or calling our office and talking to me directly. You can reach our office at 3/2/07, 7. Fantastic Steve, Thanks again. And thank you, everyone for listening to today's episode of uptime, a Douglas machine podcast. If you like what you heard and want to listen to previous episodes, make sure that you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and make sure you're going to our website. Douglas machine dotcom again. Douglas machine dotcom I'm your host. Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B till next time.