By hitching its wagon to that increasingly bright star called servo technology, P&G gains flexibility, increased capacity, and better utilization of equipment assets

If throughput on your toothpaste packaging lines is constrained and flexibility lacking, what do you do? If you’re Procter & Gamble in Gross-Gerau, Germany, you launch Project Front Door.

“It’s like opening a door to a new era of production efficiency by adding flexibility, rapid changeover, and higher speeds,” says process engineer Bjorn Kinze.

Emerging from Project Front Door was a new tube-filling line powered largely by servo technology. Most impressive is the tube filler, an IWKA model TFS-80-4. It has 29 ELAU servo drives.

Objective accomplished

“We run almost twice as many tubes per minute on this system compared to the older lines here in this plant,” says P&G maintenance supervisor Thorsten May. The older fillers are all controlled by a conventional PLC and rely on a mechanical drive/clutch/brake approach; the only servo motors involved are the two that are used to orient the tube.

“A changeover may or may not include change parts,” says Kinze. “But either way, we do it in record time. It permits us to change when the market tells us, not when our equipment will allow us to.” Changeovers typically are either from one flavor to another or from a 50-ml (1.7 oz) to a 125 ml (4.23 oz) tube.

One requirement was that the controls system be capable of changing cam profiles quickly and automatically, not only when changing from one standard product format to another, but also on the fly, while product was running. That way, if humidity or temperature or product viscosity or any number of other variables should somehow cause product to flow differently than it’s supposed to in one of the standard configurations, P&G operators/technicians can take corrective action by tweaing electronic cam profiles at the HMI screen even as tubes are being filled. operators/technicians can take corrective action by tweaing electronic cam profiles at the HMI screen even as tubes are being filled.

“Higher throughput, faster changeover, increased productivity,” says P&G’s May. “Those were the goals of Project Front Door.”

With a boost from the latest in servo technology, those goals have been accomplished.

Data Acquisition at P&G

Improved data acquisition is another benefit that grew out of Project Front Door, says process engineer Bjorn Kinze. The Line Event Data System (LEDS) now in place on the new tube line at Gross Gerau increases productivity by maximizing output through minimizing stops and downtime. It delivers data that make it possible to measure Mean Time Between Failure and Process Reliability—automatically.

“LEDS is a custom-made program first implemented in another department before we made it part of Project Front Door,” says Kinze. “We use an OPC client/server connection that reports each failure automatically. So whenever we choose we can see an accurate picture of Process Reliability and MTBF for the week, the day, or in real time. Such measurement is not new, but this is a much more efficient and automated way of doing it than having people write down a record of failures. What used to happen is a line would say, ‘I’m in failure mode.’ This new line says ‘I’m in failure mode because the tube supply is inadequate.’”