We have seen the requirement for automatic feeding and product handling grow significantly in the last few years. A typical example is this pizza packing line for a supplier of frozen pizzas.
They already had an existing Ilapak Carrera 2000PC flowpack machine which wasn't very old but they were struggling to get reliable and sensibly priced support particularly for the internal control equipment. Like most suppliers of flowpackers, the original manufacturer is Italian and only has a sales and routine service depot in the UK. An Ilapak Carrera 2000, particularly one modified for damp environments, is mechanically a well built heavy duty machine and a new equivalent machine from the original manufacturer is at the top end of the price range.
We fully refurbished
their existing flow packer, fitted our software and drive system and
discarded the original manual infeed. We built a
completely new automatic in-line infeed that accepted a range of pizzas
from 5 inch to 19 inch directly from the customer's upstream
manufacturing process.
For a fraction of the price of new equipment they had achieved latest generation full automation with expert long term support and backup. They also have a heavy duty Record Jaguar flow packer waiting in the wings for similar treatment.