All-Fill offers a Factory acceptance test, also known as a FAT, that allows our customers the ability to see their packaging equipment they ordered in action. No matter if it is a standalone model or fully integrated, we highly encourage our customers to come in for a Factory Acceptance Test. This way they can come to All-Fill and spend as much time as they want to learn the ins and outs of their new machine and receive free training. This also allows our customers the ability to ask any questions they might have about the equipment as well as, setting them up for success once it lands in their production floors. During the FAT, customers can see how it performs to the specifications that we quoted and in addition to the specifications they request to see. Depending on the application, certain add-ons might be pertinent to achieving the best possible line and this would be the time to make these changes. If they decide they want to hire our service team for startup support that is also an option.
It can be difficult to diagnose an issue with tooling in a customer’s plant simply because they do not have access to all the different sizes of augers, funnels, agitation blades, high speed blades, and cut-offs like we do in our Test Labs. It also allows us to take advantage of testing them on our BS-SV-600 filler with no hopper cover. The issue may be that the tooling is too large or too small, or maybe the auger speed (RPM) is too fast or slow. This is where the “SV” in the name “BS-SV-600” comes into play, the “SV” represents its servo motor. Since our lab filler has a servo motor it only takes the touch of a button to change from 600 rpm to 750 rpm. If the customer’s machine is a clutch brake machine, the fill belt would have to be moved from one pulley to another on the fill motor. This is much more time consuming than switching the speed on the HMI like you can do on a servo machine.
The reason we do not have a hopper cover on the lab filler is so that we can easily and quickly dump product in or remove product for a short run of sample weights. This lets us by-pass the customer’s in-feed system for a more efficient test. It also gives us the ability to look in the hopper and see how the product is reacting to the tooling, it may be that the agitation blade is moving the mass of the product. This is a common problem that negatively affects weights and can be easily overlooked when one cannot see the product inside the hopper. Luckily, it is also an easy problem to fix; we normally remove the “upper ear” of the agitation blade or apply a knife edge to the stem of the leading edge of the blade.
Being that this is a problem with fill-time, or speed, we have two options: we can try running the auger at a faster or slower speed to improve the efficiency of the product output, or we can try switching to larger set of tooling. We would most likely attempt to run the auger at a different speed first, primarily because it is the most efficient and expedient solution for both All-Fill and the customer. If this is the case, we would only need to change the RPM of the filler as opposed to making a new set of tooling for the customer. If this does not solve the problem then we would try a larger set of tooling in the lab filler with the customer’s product, 99% of the time a larger set of tooling will decrease the fill time.
Now we can take a set of sample weights (usually 20-30 weights) from the lab filler. This is where the “S” in “BS-SV-600” comes from, that stands for “Scale”. Our lab filler has an offline scale used to measure the weights and record them directly to a clean, organized lab report on an attached computer. The reason we conduct a run of sample weights is to determine the standard deviation of the weights and ensure that with this larger set of tooling we can still meet the customer’s specification on accuracy. If this new set of tooling improves our speed and meets the accuracy requirement, then we would move forward, supplying the customer with this size of tooling and go on with the rest of the Factory Acceptance Test.