Richard Whittaker Ltd is a UK-based specialist blending, packaging and dried food ingredient supply company operating 24 hours a day.
Their packaging lines can change products up to 10 times per week, requiring a full equipment cleaning procedure to be undertaken each time. All flexible connectors needed to be removed and replaced as part of this process, but the company used disposible connectors, fastened with difficult-to-fit hose-clamps.
Changeover time took more than 20 minutes and the company was looking to improve efficiency of their product line changes, and also find a more sustainable connector option.
The plant used clear ‘carrier-bag-like’ connectors held in place with jubilee clips and these were both difficult and time consuming to replace. The connectors are located over 3m off the ground so access is challenging, and the time to remove and replace the connectors was around 20 minutes per product change.
The nature of the clamped connectors meant they did not seal fully and failed regularly. They also could only be used once and were disposed of each changeover.
Richard Whittaker’s were keen to reduce their downtime by improving their product changeovers, and also wanted to find a more sustainable option than their disposable, single-use flexible connectors.
Local BFM® fitting distributor, ProSpare Ltd, recommended installing BFM® fitting’s durable Seeflex 040E BLUEBAND™ connector systems on two of their main packing lines.
The fast and easy snap-fit of the BFM® fitting has meant that, since installing the connectors, the average changeover time has been reduced by 75% to around 5 minutes - most of which is simply gaining access to the connector location! This has saved the company approximately 250 hours per year.
The BFM® fitting connectors are also lasting approximately 3 years in contrast to the single use, disposable predecessors which were disposed of each product change, saving around 1,000 connectors per year.
There are going to be far less replacements and product clean-ups required, so downtime has been drastically reduced.
“I like that the BFM® allows us to visually see the product flowing through the line and how well it contains the products, but most importantly it’s how fast and easy it is to replace because of the simple snap-fit installation.
From a maintenance perspective, it saves us hours of time per week on downtime and cleaning.”
- Maintenance Manager, Richard Whittaker Ltd
Case Study provided courtesy of BFM® Distributor ProSpare Limited (United Kingdom)
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