DongPengTeYing, the second largest energy drink producer in China after RedBull, has a unique cup like cap on the top of it’s 250ml and 500ml bottle. This innovative design well separate it from its competitors. The booming market share of DongPeng also bring the cash flow to the caps manufacturers. With increasing order, the cap manufacturers are mingled with hope and fear. Increased order means better revenue, but the increasing labour cost and low productivity make it difficult to promise a just in time delivery especially in the busy season. How could this problem to be solved?

Early in 2018, one of the cap manufacturer contacted SWITEK to look for a new caps sorting system to help them increase the loading efficiency after injection. Their question is: The injection molding machine can produce around 425000pcs of caps, and each 400pcs of caps could be loaded in the carton at random, it’ll take 10 workers to re-sort the caps to make them workable in an automated packing system.

After visit the workshop and have a thorough discussion with the production manager of DongPeng, the R&D team of SWITEK re-designed the production process to simplify the picking, sorting and loading of the caps to reduce the man hour and increase the production efficiency.

The characteristics of the new automation system:

With optimized production process to reduce the man power

With the installation of the new caps loading system, the company reduced the staffs from around 10/injection molding machine to 1 staff take care of 2~3 injection molding machine.

Well sorted caps increased the loading capacity of each carton and reduced the shipping cost

Before the installation of the automation system, around 400pcs of the caps to be loaded in each carton to be sorted in another workshop; after the installation of the automation system, 2000pcs of the caps would be well sorted before loading in each carton ready for delivery.

“With the new automation system, the just in time delivery rate increased from <70% to >97%, which helped to increase the customer satisfactory and reduced labour cost.” Mr. Liu, the production manger of the company said.