Is monitoring giveaway a good idea for your factory? If you are are a manufacturer producing fixed-weight products there is a great probability that you are facing the packager dilemma.
Packager Dilemma
According to national food packaging regulations, manufacturers must respect the fixed weight amount printed on product packaging as customers expect to find a minimum of that amount inside.
But as a business person, you also want to minimize the giveaway by keeping the overproduction as low as possible and by doing so, sparing raw material, improving machine availability, and reducing labor cost.
So how do you resolve the dilemma? By focusing on every 2 to 3 grams you can spare on each product, it’s possible to keep giveaway as low as possible. Very quickly, small gains will add up to big savings because of the volume of production.
Reducing Cost Without Infuriating Customers
As a manufacturer working to reduce giveaway costs, the monitoring of key performance indicators for giveaway is essential. You also want to prevent any consumer complaints and even lawsuits. Heinz learned the hard way with a five-year trial that ended in 2000. The company is still dealing with repercussions of the trial almost 20 years later because the amount of ketchup bottled did not always respect the weight printed on the label.
Connected Checkweigher is Key
Manufacturers use checkweighers to make sure that the finished products respect the fixed-weight printed on the packaging. The checkweigher will also play a key role to make sure the giveaway rate is as low as possible. Loma, Ishida, Bizerba or Mettler Toledo checkweighers can be connected to automatically send real-time data to a production dashboard. Alerts can be set up to identify underweight and overweight products on the line. The data collected can then be used to identify trends over time. Manufacturing analytics can help manufacturers come up with the ideal scenario to systematically reduce giveaway on all fixed-weight products being packaged in the factory.
3 Steps to Reduce Giveaway
- Make better use of real-time, actionable intelligence to bring the process into statistical control
- Tighten the process through continuous improvement
- Reduce weight variation to get closer to an average weight that respects the fixed-weight claim printed on the package
Here are a few tiles from Worximity's TileBoard software showing key performance indicators which will enable you to monitor giveaway in real-time and very quickly, help you by reducing it.
For a live demo of the TileBoard application and its Giveaway Suite, book a 15 minute virtual presentation with one of our IIoT experts.
SOURCE: https://www.hertzler.com/reducing-product-giveaway-the-packers-dilemma
