As the wine industry endures various challenges, including rising maintenance costs and reduced consumer discretionary spending, accumulation offers many benefits to help manufacturers evolve and meet those challenges.
Accumulation is Garvey’s secret weapon against micro-stoppages and bottlenecks that cut into our customers’ revenue and increase their packaging costs. Winemakers and bottling facilities can keep their lines running and maximize production by considering accumulation.
We’ll explain why we often recommend that our wine industry customers add accumulation systems to their line and some of the benefits they experience.
How Do We Determine if Your Line Would Benefit from Accumulation?
In our conversations with wine producers and their operators, they are usually aware of and understand the issues that cause stoppages of five minutes or longer.
But we are more concerned with the shorter periods of downtime that add up and impact throughput daily. If operators can mitigate these stoppages as much as possible, they can significantly improve productivity and reduce operating costs.
We focus on increasing throughput, or the line’s production rate, to prevent downtime. If we can increase the line’s throughput through accumulation, this will ultimately improve the line’s effectiveness because the constraint (the filler) will always be running, even if an upstream or downstream machine goes down.
How Do We Know If and Where to Add Accumulation?
The best way for us to help you find the best accumulation solution is through our line analysis service. A Sales Engineer will visit your facility for free to calculate the total throughput of your line and each machine’s net output.
By performing these calculations and learning more about your line, they can determine if and where to add buffers, or accumulation tables, to prevent bottlenecks that affect production.
Accumulation tables act as temporary storage areas, allowing products to accumulate when a machine goes down, or there is a disruption downstream. They also balance and ensure continuous product flow to help slower machines on the line catch up.
To learn more about how we calculate throughput on wine production lines, please check out our Guide to Increase Wine Production Line Throughput.
Why Should Wine Producers Consider Adding Accumulation to Their Line?
Increase Throughput
Wine producers and bottling facilities that add accumulation to their lines can eliminate bottlenecks that cause line stoppages and downtime. If the constraint is constantly running, more product is moving down the line, and there are fewer overall stoppages, increasing production and revenue.
On a given day, unexpected disruptions and machine failures can happen. Accumulation protects against the unexpected while maintaining the high speeds required to meet production demands.
One of the critical features of our accumulation tables is that we don’t use dead plates, which enables manufacturers to run their lines at higher speeds and increase their throughput further.
Prevent Product Collision and Breakages
Our accumulation tables are designed to continuously circulate products without backpressure to eliminate collisions and prevent product damage. As tapered wine bottles have a unique shape that makes them more unstable on the line, winemakers and bottling facilities require accumulation solutions to handle them at high speeds.
Garvey accumulators ensure your tapered bottles won’t topple, spill, or break, preventing quality issues, rejections, and worker safety incidents that frequently happen on the line. We offer various customizations on our accumulators to ensure gentler product handling.
Maintenance and production costs decrease when you have fewer quality issues and incidents, increasing profit.
Meet Demand and Increase Capabilities
Domestic and global demand for wine in the US is growing even as the industry faces post-pandemic challenges related to spending and costs. As a new generation of wine enthusiasts discover what they like, winemakers that can scale production and meet delivery times should be in the best position to reach them.
Increased production capabilities allow winemakers to test new styles, release limited runs, and collaborate with other winemakers. Also, by increasing throughput and accomplishing more in less time, bottling facilities can consider bottling for additional companies.
Whether you are in the business of making wine or operating a bottling facility, accumulation can help you accomplish your production goals and meet consumer demand.
Schedule Your Line Analysis with Garvey Today
Accumulation is a proven way to increase throughput, reduce quality issues, and meet consumer demand. As the wine industry explores ways to accomplish these and resolve production issues, we recommend you schedule your line analysis with Garvey to see if adding accumulation can help.
We have helped our customers in the wine industry increase their throughput by up to 30% and understand their unique challenges. Our Sales Engineers will work with your team to see where accumulation would work on your line and recommend solutions that fit your needs and budget. We look forward to working with you.