American workers stay longer in the office, at the factory or on the farm than their counterparts in Europe and most other rich nations, and they produce more per person over the year. They also get more done per hour than everyone but the Norwegians, according to a U.N. report which said the United States “leads the world in labor productivity.”
Lindal North America, Columbus, IN, specializes in the production of valves, actuators, spray caps and overcaps for a range of consumer products. At its Columbus plant, Lindal wasn’t using conveyors to increase efficiencies in the manufacture of closure parts with multiple presses.
The company had been dropping prepared parts into boxes via chutes on the molding machines. As Lindal molding engineer Jay Bray explains, “We were manually changing boxes as they were filled and had to do a weigh-check on each box, using a variety of check weighing machines. If we didn’t manually move a box off the line fast enough, parts would back up into the chute and the drop zone. Production got clogged, resulting in downtime.”
In discussions with a colleague from a previous working experience, Bray learned about the modular “DynaCon” conveyor system from Dynamic Conveyor Corp. The colleague recommended the start-stop flexibility and reliability of the DynaCon conveyors for companies who wanted to reconfigure their conveying systems.
Advantages of the modular DynaCon conveying system include the fact that the polycarbonate modules that make up the system are shipped in a box. So they are relatively easy to completely assemble in-plant and easy to reconfigure, if conveyor system needs change. They also provide a self-lubricating feature, improving traction and durability, and the conveyors are relatively easy to clean and maintain.
Lindal contacted Dynamic Conveyor for advice, and the company sent a representative to the Columbus plant to assess Lindal’s conveying requirements. After discussions and negotiations, Lindal North America installed DynaCon indexing conveyors with quick stop-start and reverse-drive capabilities beginning in July 2011 through January 2012.
Bray says, “The indexing DynaCon conveyors allow us important ‘cushion’ time. They give our people more operating flexibility. They give us a larger time window—it was about 7 minutes and now it’s about 28 minutes—to perform other surrounding tasks without having to go back and ‘balance’ box component-count quantities later. So we‘ve improved labor usage efficiencies, while ensuring consistent box-loading accuracies.”
