In the first in a series of customer focus days, Heye International welcomed senior production experts from the Stölzle group to Obernkirchen, Germany recently to discuss their development priorities.
Stölzle has emerged as an important customer for hot and cold end equipment in recent years and members of Heye’s technical team were on hand to share the company’s latest innovations, while discovering the customer’s current and future priorities.
Based on more than 200 years of experience, Stölzle maintains a leading role in the international healthcare, pharmaceutical, perfumery and cosmetics and the prestige spirits markets. The group operates 37 production lines at six manufacturing sites in Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Poland and the UK, as well as three specialist decoration sites. Its goal is to be the first choice partner for both customers and employees, by establishing a culture of reciprocal trust and by striving for first class performance, flexibility and reliability. More than 2200 people are employed throughout the world, delivering 2.6 billion glass containers every year.
Ten senior members of Stölzle’s multi-national production team attended the meeting in Obernkirchen, where Cold end Manager, Gerd Müller presented the group’s latest developments, including the creation of a centre of excellence for cosmetic flacons at the Masnieres plant in northern France.
As well as discussing best practice solutions for the glass container production process, the workshop addressed inspection priorities for the future. This included a debate about which cold end inspection functions could be moved to the hot end, the elements required in the ‘ideal’ inspection machine and the potential for automatic job changes. In addition, the value of a blue sky development to check the visual features of cosmetics flacons was emphasised.