Each mould is used to glue two pieces together with a certain tolerance at 400°C in a furnace. The furnace contains 400 moulds 80kgs each.

The adjustment of each mould is done by a reference mould and takes 2 man hours work, with the mould offline. Obvious this costs too much time with no production. PPE Holland was involved to develop a quicker and more reliable adjustment procedure.

During a review it was shown, that 20% of the machine capacity was not used.

Together with the factory process engineers a new procedure to control the adjustment process has been developed.

The adjustment time for one mould was reduced from 2 hours offline till 1 minute inline. The product quality increased significantly.

Average displacement error reduced from 0.7 mm till 0.1 mm. Standard deviation displacement error reduced from 0.4 mm till 0.1 mm.

Savings:

• Production increase 20%. (bottle-neck)
• Yield increase 5%.