The New Efficiency? Two-Part Liquid Filling Systems

A diagnostic material manufacturer, achieving reliable filling performance was historically a struggle. The company was facing increasing demand, and none of its three filling lines were up to the task. In fact, one line, the newest of the three, was rated to fill 720,000 bottles per day, but was only filling 360,000 on its best days. The company spent years and money trying to fix the performance issues through a combination of its own engineering team and support from the OEM to no avail.

In addition to the throughput and utilization, there were stoppering issues in this two-part fill–and–stopper process. After the diagnostic material is filled, a stopper is partially inserted into the bottle.

But, the company was experiencing a significant amount of stopper rejects, having both false accepts as well as false rejects … unacceptable. There were also issues related to setup and changeover that were supposed to take less than 30 minutes but were taking more than two hours. Setting up the pumps, manually dialing in the accuracy, and complicated offline cleaning all contributed to high levels of downtime and low utilization.