30 n MACHINE-BUILDING October 2025 www.drivesncontrols.com Flexible motion systems cope with expanding product variety Ever noticed how your favourite Walkers crisps almost always expire on a Saturday? That’s because the company’s production week starts on Sunday, so everything made that week shares the same “best before”date. This small detail points to a bigger challenge: the changing number of stock-keeping units (SKUs) in consumer goods is making food and beverage manufacturing even more complex. In recent years, major food and beverage manufacturers such as Unilever, Coca-Cola and Tyson have been cutting back on underperforming product lines to improve margins and cut their overheads. According to a study of the packaging market by LEK Consulting, that trend has only accelerated post-Covid, as brands have increased their focus on core products. However, not everyone is playing it safe, with many remaining committed to product innovation, releasing new flavours, changing to more sustainable packaging, and introducing new pack sizes to satisfy consumer demands. So, is product development slowing down or just changing? For manufacturers, the answer points to more complexity, not less. More product lines mean more changeovers, more downtime and a lot more manual set-up. Traditional conveyor lines were designed for high-volume, low-variation production, churning out identical products for hours or even days at a time. When you manufacture dozens of lines, each with different packaging, ingredients or sizes, everything changes. Every format shift – moving from a shared bag to a multi-pack, say – requires retooling, which can take operations offline for minutes or even hours. This constant starting and stopping slows down production, drives up costs and puts huge pressure on production teams who must juggle batch sizes, cleaning protocols and schedules. That’s why manufacturers need an approach that can handle variety without production grinding to a halt. Rather than relying on manual adjustments and long changeovers, the future is in flexible motion profiles. Such profiles improve the changeover between different production lines, running multiple product variants side-by-side without stopping. Flexible linear transport systems, like Beckhoff’s XTS system, offer new ways to move products through manufacturing lines. Instead of traditional conveyors, magnetically driven shuttles glide along integrated motor tracks. Each shuttle can be controlled independently with its own motion profile. This means the system is ready-to-go right after set-up, with no fiddly wiring or adjustments needed. Plus, manufacturers can save space and build machines that fit their exact needs because the tracks can be designed in different shapes and layouts. For example, the OEM machine-builder Brenton has retrofitted a pizza case-packing machine with the XTS system and can now handle 26 different types of frozen pizza on the same line. The system processes up to 27 cases per minute – or around 140 pizzas. It also cut infeed changeover times from 30 minutes to just five. What used to take three separate machines, now runs smoothly on a single, flexible XTS-driven line. The 5.5m-long XTS track uses 12 shuttles or “movers”, pairs of which create clamping forces to grip the pizza stacks and stabilise them for fast, secure transport to case-packing steps. “That’s the beauty of this machine – it takes a stack of 15 shrink-wrapped circular pizzas and can quickly adapt to an infeed of pizzas already in square packaging – all with minimal changeover time,”explains Mike Grinager, Brenton’s vice-president of technology. XTS also compensates for different infeed timing because the movers can take up any distance and buffer product in front of the load station to give other production processes extra time if needed. “XTS greatly reduces jams and downtime as it moves perfectly stacked pizzas into cartons,”Grinager reports. “None of this was possible with other systems we evaluated.” With AI, predictive analytics and smart factories, manufacturers are starting to plan production around real-time demand. To do that, they need production systems built to handle change, and ones that can deal with complexity. n As manufacturers introduce a greater variety of products more frequently, they need production systems that can adapt quickly and easily to the new items. Beth Ragdale, software business manager at Beckhoff UK, explains how software-defined motion systems can help them to accommodate changing demand, improving batch-level control. The linear transport system in Brenton’s case-packing machine can handle 26 different types of frozen pizza
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