The mechanics of filling and packaging systems are durable and reliable – to the great satisfaction of the operator. As in devices for household use, however, the electrical technology designed to control lines and machines has a shorter life span. Standard components are removed from the market in this segment after just a few years and replaced by more modern, more powerful systems. Spare parts and service for older variants are thus harder to come by and become more costly for the customer. How, then, can assurance be given in the long term in this area in particular, helping the production process to keep on running smoothly even after many years? A new solution to this problem was recently found at the largest mineral water bottling plant in Germany, Gerolsteiner Brunnen GmbH & Co. KG, who tackled this challenge in close cooperation with their long-standing partner the KHS Group.
Mineral water has been bottled in the district of Gerolstein in the volcanic hills of the Eifel in Rhineland-Palatinate since 1888. This is where Gerolsteiner Brunnen GmbH & Co. KG produces the biggest-selling brand of mineral water in Germany. In 2014 alone the company sold 6.6 million hectoliters of its produce. In Gerolstein 3.5 million returnable and non-returnable PET and glass bottles of mineral water are filled on average per day. Gerolsteiner operates a total of eleven filling systems and as the biggest mineral water exporter in Germany distributes its products worldwide. Exports make up around 5% of total sales, with the biggest export countries the USA, Japan and Benelux.
For a company like Gerolsteiner it is extremely important that longer downtimes on its filling lines are avoided. This is why regular optimization of all of its plant engineering is very much part of day-to-day business. When last year KHS partly renewed a palletizer in the returnable PET filling area, the machine's outmoded drive technology (a robot in the KUKA KRC2 series) drew attention to itself by repeatedly causing disruptions. It was very difficult to procure spare parts for the outdated control system. Replacing the machine would not only have been time consuming but also annoying as the mechanics were still functioning perfectly. Replacing the system would have also meant a downtime of several weeks. It was thus important to avoid a longer standstill purely for economic reasons – a fact the production management at Gerolstein was well aware of. On site it was nevertheless clear that a big change would have to be made to prevent longer downtimes in the long term. "We checked if it was possible to simply replace the old controller with the model which had just appeared on the market – in other words, to simply upgrade the old electronics and drive technology," reports Ingo Henze, service engineer at KHS. This may sound easy – but had not yet been done at that time.
