Page 28 - Glass Machinery Plants & Accessories no. 6/2017

COMPANY UPDATE
Company update
When we see savings in energy
and resources and not only man-
power – when we see a swabbing
robot – we try to decrease the
resources used in terms of oil and
other material that you need in
container glass production.
SAFETY, SPEED
AND THE REDUCTION Heye Smart Plant
OF THE GLASS WEIGHT
Mark Ziegler: Safety is one
of the issues we are addressing
right now – with special safety
grids which move up and down, gration where all the information DEVELOPING PRODUCTS
or with LED lights for every sec- comes together and is made avail- Developing products is easy to
tion, indicating if a section is safe able, making it easy to see where say, but to develop good products
to work in (green) or running there is a problem or where a you need to have a solid base and
(red). mould needs to be modified, or in the hot end we are speaking
And this is all connected to our even just where settings needs to about the IS machine of course.
smart plant concept, which we be changed. The borders between hot end and
can sum up as follows: At Heye, our Smart Process cold end will become less impor-
t *OUFHSBUJOH UIF CFTU UFDIOPMP- Controls control e.g. wall thick- tant. In a Smart Plant all data are
gies from Industry 4.0 and the ness, gob weight and coolings, integrated and information will
internet of things all to avoid critical defects like be shared.
t *NQMFNFOUJOH JO UIF MPOH SVO unfilled or overpressed finishes.
a fully automated, stable and Flexibility is another important GMP&A: What about speed? Has
safe production process aspect: we can now have different Heye reached its speed limit or are
The ideal smart plant will be bottles being made on the same you still working to make things
very profitable, resource-efficient machine. even faster?
and delivering high quality con- The IS machine, which is the Langer: We are actually still
tainers. biggest machine at the hot end, working on speed together with
At Heye we have implemented is a platform from where we can our customers, which should take
different enabling technologies integrate with other suppliers. us to a really extraordinary level.
that support this technology and Heye is the inventor of the Of course we must also focus
will become cheaper as the tech- NNPB process (Narrow Neck on flexibility as we said before
nology develops – such as such Press and Blow), and this process because our machines and services
as smaller and cheaper sensors. is now becoming very popular in go to different sized glassworks –
Our work is based on four dif- Asia because all the European from those that make a few bottles
ferent ‘columns’, the first being and Western breweries and com- and small but different batches,
improved integration in produc- panies are starting to work there right up to glassworks that have
tion sites for information man- and they obviously want to have continuous production runs for
agement and integrated engineer- the same level of quality. This is incredible numbers of bottles and
ing are also important aspects to challenging the local glassmakers containers all of the same type.
consider with regards to the value in Asia to become more familiar However, speed also depends
chain. There is also the possibility with this process. This in turn is on the type of containers you are
of laser marking of the containers creating a great opportunity for making, and our job is to get the
at the hot end, which means that Heye not only with regards to the maximum for each container, with
each and every container has its technology, but also for the sup- the complete system – from the
number and can be traced right port we give to our customers to feeder to the lehr – running at a
back to production. This is an obtain the best possible levels of certain speed that gives the best
essential value for containers in production. it can, eliminating and improving
all industry sectors, but especially So weight reduction also the weakest point in this produc-
for high-valued spirit bottles or means savings in raw materials tion chain. We do this with our
the pharmaceutical industry. and energy, and all contribute in Process Control and Plant Pilot
Another aspect is vertical inte- protecting our environment. systems.

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