Quick Changeovers with OPERA

Easy to manage and requiring a bare minimum of maintenance, the OPERA labeller has been designed by Sacmi to work continuously.

7/6/2011 --- Over 3500 different products, marketed in 200 countries worldwide. That, in a nutshell, is Coca-Cola. With this packaging diversity comes the need for extremely high output rates and outstanding flexibility. And with Sacmi’s OPERA, they’ve found exactly what they were looking for.

Coca-Cola United, Inc. decided to install four OPERA 300 RF 24T/SR labellers in their brand new, state-of-the-art facility in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Able to label 700 bottles a minute and, above all, manage size changeovers quickly and efficiently, (thanks to the “quick change” systems), changeover times were reduced.

OPERA can be used with cylindrical and/or shaped containers in PET, glass or metal, and can handle wrap-around labels or those made of different materials. The labelling station features two independent reel supports, complete with film tension control device and an automatic correction system to ensure vertical positioning. “We chose Sacmi labellers”, explains Baton Rouge Coca-Cola United’s Operations Manager, Mike Lurker, “for their outstanding output rates, excellent reliability and ability to handle various bottle types efficiently”.

Easy to manage and requiring a bare minimum of maintenance, the OPERA labeller has been designed by Sacmi to work continuously. The machine offers multiple advantages, the most significant being the servo motor mounted on the film drive roller, which corrects feed speed, the absence of label transfer grippers (labels are transferred using vacuum technology) and, above all, cutters guaranteed to cut 100,000,000 labels.

“We run different materials Suppliers, different shapes and different label types even on bottles of the same ‘size’,” sums up Lurker. These, then, are the essential requirements of the Coca-Cola labelling process. Sacmi’s gems – installed on Lines 2 and 3 of the Baton Rouge plant – have successfully met them. Right at the top of the Sacmi Labelling range, the OPERA series has, over the last ten years, been steadily perfected and now stands out not just because of extremely high output rates – up to 50,000 bottles per hour – and extreme reliability and flexibility, but also outstanding modularity: that means shared parts for all the machines in the series, allowing, on the one hand, minimisation of spare part stocks, and, on the other, a more effective response to changing marketing needs.