– Problem
Sometimes you can do the job in-house, but other times, it’s smarter to work with others. That’s what Kliklok-Woodman Packaging Solutions discovered. For more than 50 years, Kliklok-Woodman, of Decatur, Georgia has built forming, filling, cartoning and packaging equipment for the bakery and frozen food industry. Sometimes they design and manufacture tabletop chain conveyors for use with their equipment. Bur their new Model ECT625 glue-forming machine requires a belt-style outfeed conveyor. The machine takes flat paperboard and folds, forms and glues it to make cartons of varying sizes. After forming, the cartons drop onto a conveyor to the customer’s filling line to be loaded with product. Kliklok-Woodman considered devoting its internal design and manufacturing resources to this project, then tried to find a compatible, dependable product at a better price.
-Solution
Dorner manufacturing offers a wide variety of conveyor systems with profiles, widths, lengths, belts and other options to meet virtually every need. In Kliklok-Woodman’s case, the Dorner 6100 Series low-profile conveyors fit the bill. Dorner’s self-tracking, FDA-approved belts meet the stringent requirements for use in the food industry. The 6100 Series also features adjustable product guiding to accommodate different sized objects, like the cartons formed by Kliklok-Woodman machines. Best of all, these conveyors can be ordered and assembled to your exact specifications at a price far below custom-built conveyors.
-Benefit
Kliklok-Woodman found a standard product that gives them a custom-type solution. “We couldn’t build a better conveyor for what we paid for the Dorner 6100 Series,” said Robert Pagendarm, one of Kliklok-Woodman’s mechanical engineers. “It made sense in terms of both cost and convenience.” Pagendarm reports that the Dorner conveyors are performing very well, just as they’d hoped. Even though the firm has in-house design and construction capabilities, they found that in this situation, choosing Dorner saved money, time and effort – a smart choice all around.
