Packaging manufacturer performance improves with PlantRun

Northern Paper Board is one of the largest stockists and manufacturers of boxes in the UK, offering solid board and corrugated solutions primarily to the food processing industry.

The company has invested in a PlantRun OEE system for manufacturing improvement at their site at Skipton, UK. PlantRun was chosen over an upgrade of a legacy LED signage board system.

PlantRun Display Node hardware is being used to replace LED signage boards to show live KPI’s in the production areas. Display Node connects to large screen TVs, generates full colour dynamic displays and can also show MS Powerpoint slides for custom messaging.

The system monitors manufacturing assets including Bobst diecutters, Bobst folder gluers, Derritend printer, feed and stacker robot arms, Borst and Taurus stretch wrap pallet wrappers and conveyor wagon.

Asset production speeds are continuously monitored and reasons captured for any period of slow speed running. Downtime is captured in a similar way with reasons selected for ‘long’ stoppages and all short stoppage events recorded. All such events are recorded and available for analysis and reporting with built in tools.

The system can email when system alarms are triggered & send timed reports to groups of recipients, which is especially useful for morning management meetings.

A recurring production disturbance was eliminated soon after the system was installed. Extended stoppages of the pallet wrappers was causing production to shutdown completely. To ensure rapid response to stoppages a high intensity audible alarm is triggered by the system whenever a stoppage occurs.

The robot arms and pallet wrappers also stop with faults from time to time. These stoppages can generally be resolved quickly by an operator and do not result in the associated asset stopping – for example the robot arm feeding a diecutter can stop for a short period of time without causing the diecutter itself to stop. In order to capture the frequency of these events they are monitored, counted and recorded so that they can be reviewed at a later date.