IEN: How do MH vendors handle lean/agile manufacturing mandates?
Streblow: For many light assembly and manufacturing operations, one of the major impediments to making the timely adjustments that lean manufacturing demands can be in changing, upgrading, or acquiring the conveyor system. For most operations this equipment can be a major capital purchase that can take months to manufacture, ship, and install.
Nercon Eng & Mfg has recognized the fast-moving demands of the lean manufacturing approach. To make bringing online a new or modified conveyor layout as prompt as many of the other alterations in the process, the company introduces Conveyor Mart. This concept in do-it-yourself specification makes obtaining a layout fast, flexible, and easy to order, bringing a conveyor line online in just weeks.
This concept starts with a complete line of stock value-priced modular conveyor components, which can make up virtually any conveyor layout.
Buyers can select from a growing assortment of approximately 2,500 items. This array of components includes conveyors, modular conveyors, and conveyor replacement parts for conveyor, modular conveyor, material handling, and packaging machinery projects.
Part of this lineup is the well-known Taylor Conveyor line of predesigned modular conveyors and parts, providing rapid delivery of systems thanks to economical quantities of stock components, augmented by non-stock lengths ready for quick fabrication, using a library of CAD files. As a system''s needs change, modular components can be reused in different layouts to save money and, most importantly for many operations, time.
These components can be delivered in a fraction of the time and their durability stacks up to competing products that take much longer to fabricate. All Conveyor Mart components, including the Modular Tabletop Series, are rugged and have smooth, quiet operation. The program offers guide rail and brackets in adjustable widths and heights for outstanding product handling.
Depending upon the operation, the Modular Tabletop line is manufactured in mild steel or stainless steel for food or medical product handling lines. Multiple chain widths ensure the system can fit any package-conveying requirement.
The Conveyor Wizard feature provided for Conveyor Mart makes specifying a conveyor layout practically as easy as ordering books or booking a hotel room online. While some managers may go directly to the Storefront page on the site to order components, those who need assistance in pinpointing the proper conveyor can turn to the easy-to-navigate Conveyor Wizard for help.
Conveyor Wizard puts effective layout design at the user''s fingertips. The key to a successfully configured layout will be understanding product handling needs and the properties of the products to be conveyed. With all the specifications in mind, the Wizard takes over to put together the layout. If the user is unsure of what choice to make, the Nercon help desk is a phone call away.
Once the information is input and pricing scrolls out, the user is ready to place the order. The operation is just days away from receiving the complete layout.
Once the user is familiar with the Conveyor Wizard, this tool opens up possibilities of easily bringing on modifications and encourages operations managers, plant managers, and material handling engineers to use their imaginations in getting a layout that fulfills their goals.
IEN: What innovations are in store for users of MH vehicles, equipment, systems, components, materials, software, and services?
Streblow: Among the many requirements of industry and material handling, Nercon is responding with products that can handle changing workflow and need less maintenance.
Multilevel Handling: Products travel on conveyor systems that can run on several levels, and many conveyor lines must offer an archway so the other side of the line can be accessed by personnel. To reliably move products along these multilevel systems, Nercon recently introduced the Flex Lift Vertical Conveyor.
The Flex Lift picks up products off the line with a product platform, using a combination of structural tube and geometric blocks to create multiple locking surfaces. This, in turn, locks the product platform into a level position, ensuring maximum product stability during the vertical transfer. Products enter the Flex Lift in a continuous motion, without the need of an indexer.
The goal for Nercon was to design the robust Flex Lift Vertical Conveyor to easily fit into the operation, to be easy to maintain, and for quick delivery. The geometric blocks provide a rigid product platform in the vertical conveying mode and a collapsible product platform in the return path. This design allows the unit one of the smallest footprints in the industry, making it easy to fit into increasingly tight floor layouts.
Nercon engineers have reduced most of the components commonly found in this type of equipment that require constant maintenance, such as bearings and sprockets. Heavy-duty UHMW idler wheels replace all of the idler chain sprockets, increasing the service life of the lifting chains. The open construction of the Flex Lift Vertical Conveyor allows quick and simple access to all components.
Accumulator Provides Smooth Product Flow: In a perfect world, an accumulator is unnecessary because the process at the end of the conveyor keeps up with the work coming off the line. Now, back to the reality. Many times the scene at the end of the line includes products piling up and being unloaded by hand because that part of the system cannot maintain the pace.
To provide a smooth flow of products throughout the process, the Nercon Flex Flow Variable Length Accumulator operates on the concept of an expandable travel path, which automatically changes length to match fluctuations in production.
Reducing downtime of the generating unit, the Flex Flow increases overall production efficiency and operating profits. The inline accumulation delivers a more consistent product flow to downstream equipment, which in turn increases the operational reliability of these production line machines.
Side transfer is required at the infeed and at the discharge. At all other corners the product is driven around the radius designed into the Flex Flow, preventing locking or wedging. Product is carried on one continuous crescent-style chain, ensuring that production line backpressure is nonexistent, which prevents product damage.
The unit provides first-in, first-out accumulation, and maintains product orientation. Minimal changeover is required when going from one product size to another size.
Nercon is in the process of developing other accumulator components that optimize conveyor throughput.
IEN: How do you cope with the pressure of evolving standards?
Streblow: For many Nercon customers, our sales engineers are in reality outside consultants for these businesses. The Nercon representatives come to know and anticipate the needs of their accounts to help create effective conveyor systems.
We recognize that conveyor systems are the lifeblood of many operations and have impact beyond the line itself. The only way we can make those systems as useful as possible within all the demands faced by Nercon customers is to have in-depth contact with them.