Alliance Helps Improve Productivity for Box Plants
Happy New Year from the team at Alliance. We thank all of our customers for placing their trust in Alliance products and systems. After a couple of very robust and hectic years, we believe the machinery segment will cool as customers digest the capacity purchased in 2021 and 2022. We see GDP cooling and interest rates rising to 10-year highs. GDP is important to the integrateds who fund the projects from cash flow, and interest rates are important to the independents who usually finance their projects.
Alliance Application Engineers have been helping box makers advance finishing equipment speeds and productivity, contributing to the growth of the corrugated industry. Our team of Development Engineers has created innovative and productive solutions to handle a wide variety of box production needs, from small e-commerce containers to jumbo-sized specialty boxes. Our customers look to us to help them maximize profits, and we take that responsibility seriously.
Alliance offers high-speed upstream feeding and downstream handling systems that range from semi-automatic, operator-assisted machines to fully automatic equipment that frees operators for other duties. Whether making 800 boxes per minute on high-speed flexo folder gluer or maximizing the die cut area of a rotary die cutter, our products include fully automated robotic load formers, palletizers, stackers, prefeeders, pallet handlers, specialty folder gluers, and more.
After a very strong showing in 2022 for sales on back-end automation that trend seems to be continuing in that direction. Automation not only improves productivity, but it can also save labor. Many of our customers are replacing two older, low-productivity lines with one automated high-productivity line. The new line can be run with two operators whereas the older lines required three operators each. The result is for a three-shift operation, 12 operators can achieve what took 18 operators to run two lines previously. At $75K per operator per year, here’s another $450,000 in savings.
What was unique about 2022 vs previous years was that, instead of focusing on one, our focus shifted towards all segments of palettizing. Alliance sold all 4 models: The high-performing Raptor 4x2, the Raptor RDC for die-cut palletizing, UltraPAL, and the cross-functional RaptorPAL.
Recently, Alliance released the latest solution for digital printer prefeeding. Based on our reliable and proven FeedMAX platform, the digital print prefeeder feeds the board into the digital printer on the long dimension and is capable of either inverting or not inverting the board. Additionally, two lanes of board can be fed simultaneously into the digital printer, effectively doubling its throughput.
In the early fall of this year, we will be launching our New Electric Prefeeder.
We continue to maintain our focus on productivity-enhancing technical innovations, such as bottom sheet systems that use vision technology to scan random-size dunnage and automatically compute the number of sheets required to ensure exact placement of each sheet and obtain the coverage needed.
With more than 16,000 installations around the world, our team of engineers offers technical expertise across the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and beyond backed by a robust customer care staff who provide dedicated installation, training, service, parts, and other support.
Alliance’s mission is to build trust and create value for our customers, seek new ways to innovate, employ positive communication, and operate with integrity. In today’s world of labor shortages and pressure to do more with less, Alliance Machine Systems International, LLC continues to provide world class solutions to all our corrugated customers.