An Adaptable "Snap in Place" Approach
Henry Tamangi, Maintenance Manager, with Comar Inc., a company that manufactures packaging and liquid dispensing solutions for the pharmaceutical industry, has found a reconfigurable modular conveyor system that opens up whole new vistas in "changing on the fly." Because The product line Comar produces is so diverse, those new processes being ordered by the front office are not such problems after all.

Comar’s processes consist of three departments: blow molding, injection molding and a secondary operations department that performs offset printing, hot stamping, silk screening and assembly of all molded components. The parts are molded, go through finishing in secondary operations and are then shipped out.

Comar integrates their processes and departments using DynaCon reconfigurable conveyor systems, produced by Dynamic Conveyor Corporation of Muskegon, Mich.

"What is so nice about them is that they are modular," Tamangi said. "You can take them apart shorten them, lengthen them, change the angles, or change the drive motors to be constant speed or variable speed. You can change the configuration of them quite easily."

Reconfigurable modular conveyors are used to connect different machines. For example, if a molding machine is connected to a printing machine, the conveyor is used to connect the two so there is an inline process; parts do not need to be placed in a box and physically moved. In two different applications, a molding machine, an offset printer, an assembly machine and a wrapper have all been linked. Tamangi estimates there are 50 reconfigurable conveyor systems throughout his facility.

"We’ve tried other conveyers that were touted as similar, but I wouldn’t say that they are modular like the DynaCons. We have so many because we have good success with them," he says.

Because these systems are specifically made to be pulled apart and reassembled as needed, maintenance is quite easy. "Because we serve the pharmaceutical industry, the systems have to be cleaned and doing that with the DynaCon system is very easy," Tamangi said. "We just clean them from time to time when needed." We can pull the conveyors apart, take the belts outside, and power wash them. Each conveyor gets power washed once or twice a month, depending on the job."

Although they are dreaded, malfunctions do occur in from time-to-time in every manufacturing process. Recently, Comar experienced a substantial water leak on a 550-ton press and had to roll the conveyor out. But because the conveyor system was so easily removed and put back in place, the event was much less dramatic than it might have been. "Because it was a DynaCon conveyor, the cleaning time was cut at least in half," Tamangi reported. "We just rolled it away from the press" power washed, cleaned, and sanitized the entire conveyor and put it back in service. With metal conveyors you really can’t power wash them down, so a lot of hand wiping would take place; a lot of elbow grease."

Another company in a similar industry utilizing the same conveyor technology had an instance of having to move an entire process to a different floor. The process utilized three conveyors, but once it was moved to its new location and rearranged for the new work area, the flow had been reduced to two conveyors and there were considerable leftover parts. With traditional conveyor technology, those parts would have gone to waste, but because of the versatile nature of these conveyors the parts were able to be re-utilized for an entire new system in another area of the plant.