Filling a Design Need

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Packaging Machine Builder Reorganizes Its Approach to Modular Machine Design With an Integrated E-CAD Package as Its Centerpiece

By Hendrik Stoltz, Elopak

A machine OEM’s transition to the world of modular design is like a journey. In the case of Elopak, the journey begins with a visit to the supermarket to understand how critical modern machine design is to a liquid food packaging company such as ours.

Look on any gable-top carton of milk, juice, even sugar or molasses, for the Pure-Pak logo. Elopak was formed in 1957 as the European licensee of Pure-Pak and became a major supplier of Pure-Pak cartons in Europe. In 1987, Elopak purchased the U.S. assets of Ex-Cell-O’s packaging systems division. Today Elopak, based in Norway, is one of the world’s leading companies within liquid food packaging.

The Pure-Pak carton forms, shipped flat to dairies and other liquid food distributors, look to the consumer much like gable-top cartons have always looked, but Elopak also designs and builds huge machines with technology to fill Pure-Pak  cartons. Our Elopak subsidiary in New Hudson, Mich., is the main global production source for Elopak’s filling machines, like our Pure-Pak P-S120UC—UC stands for “ultra clean”—which in our view is the cleanest high-speed filler on the market (Figure 1). It can form, fill and seal 12,000 cartons/hour in sizes up to one quart or 1.15 l and insert a plastic screw cap. It offers features like a HEPA clean air system, individual clean-in-place (CIP) stations, carton sterilization and hygienic filling. Almost 11-ft tall, the main body of the 15-metric-ton machine is a tight squeeze for a 40-ft ocean container. It has more than 2,000 electrical components, and its electrical documentation PDF file is about 25 MB, or 750 pages.

Time to Change

All of our machines offer options that to this point have been designed into each individual unit. That approach entails a great deal of duplicate design. We came to the realization more than two years ago that we had to change the way we do our engineering. In essence, we had to turn the organizational structure upside down.

Modular Necessity Figure 1: Elopak’s P-S120UC filler has more than 2,000 electrical components and its electrical documentation PDF file is about 750 pages. Anchoring its new design strategy around a new E-CAD approach allows Elopak to offer different configurations of the same machine as standard. Source: ELOPAK

The answer was to convert the operation to “top down modular universal” (TDMU) development. Elopak coined the term to define our new engineering strategy, which goes beyond increasing productivity and improving quality and cost competitiveness. It will provide flexibility to give customers what they want as standard. Instead of building standard models with options that require additional design, TDMU will allow us to offer different configurations of the same machine as standard, distinguishing us from our competitors. TDMU will create a more seamless and consistent design process. In today’s world, everything is electromechanical anyway. Among our implementation goals for TDMU, mechanical and electrical design are being fully integrated into our PLM system, Windchill, a collaborative product lifecycle management software.”

Concurrent with the launch of the TDMU project, we concluded that our existing electrical computer-aided design (E-CAD) software was woefully inadequate, prone to generating incomplete reports, dropping drawing files and data and failing to reproduce some graphic elements in PDF files. Much time was lost verifying the accuracy and completeness of work. Hundreds of pages of data per project had to be entered and verified manually to generate reports.

Of critical importance, vendor support was virtually nonexistent, and neither the software nor the vendor could accommodate our TDMU objectives. We felt that our E-CAD software should be like a traveling partner in this project, helping to broaden the possibilities rather than being a passive observer or, worse, a hindrance.
The Analysis Is Clear

An analysis by one of our electrical engineers, Michael Ballinger, showed our legacy E-CAD was costing Elopak in a range of $25,000-$30,000 annually per engineer, based on $20 for each hour of lost productivity caused by its deficiencies and insufficiencies. Elopak has six electrical engineers for hardware design, so the annual lost productivity cost could exceed $150,000.

Ballinger was tasked with performing an analysis of possible replacement E-CAD packages. Our objectives were to achieve greater stability, reliability and productivity through increased design automation. To keep up with global standards, we needed to adopt IEC/DIN standards, which have been driving the global language in electrical design. These objectives all were designed to help facilitate introduction of TDMU. Moving toward parts standardization compelled us to give consideration to how our parts database could be accessible through the E-CAD.

We established an objective drawing competition between two E-CAD finalists. “The package consisted of PLC I/O, a heater circuit, a controlled-loop PID, terminal diagrams, panel layouts, power generation and associated reports,” says Ballinger. “Both programs could do macros, although each does them differently. We wanted to know how much time and how many mouse clicks it would take to draw that circuit in both E-CAD environments, implement the I/O in that circuit, put the panel layout on paper and generate the reports, and to compare the reliability of the reports.”