A soft drinks manufacturer was generating huge amounts of plastic waste and experiencing high labour costs due to an inefficient pallet wrapping system. By working with Hazel 4D to conduct film trials and testing they were able to pinpoint the problems and find cost-effective solutions that drove drive valuable improvements.
Three turntable wrapping machines had been poorly set up with inefficient programs, resulting in frequent film snappages. Operators were having to compensate for these snappages by overwrapping by hand whilst the turntable machine was in motion!! This doubled the amount of film used per pallet whilst also increasing labour costs and leading to H&S issues.
A backlog of pallets from the wrapping machines led to many being wrapped by “hand only”, a labour intensive exercise with a far longer wrap time of around 3 minutes per pallet.
The loads were also being wrapped too low onto the pallets, which was resulting in the film being pierced or split by forklift trucks, thus creating significant weak spots in the pallet wrap.
The customer was actively reducing the grade of material in their primary and secondary packaging, which had also had a detrimental effect on the overall stability of the pallets. Better wrapping programs were required to compensate for this.
Through extensive trials, Hazel 4D were able to demonstrate a significant improvement in load containment force (stability) and a far more consistent wrapping sequence. This was a result of switching to high performance Extremus NANO15 film, reconfiguring the wrapping program and making some minor mechanical upgrades to one of the machines.
“We started working with Hazel 4D at one of our co-packing facilities and we very much appreciated their support. They were able to quickly highlight the weak points in some of our pallet formats and they not only recommended alternative materials to use but also advised on stretch wrap program set up. Their intervention helped to reduce material usage and to eliminate returned loads from customers.”
65%
Reduced weight of plastic
2 min
of operator time saved per pallet wrapped
59%
Reduced cost and plastic tax per pallet wrapped
£169,000
Approx annual cost savings
