Hitting Essential Filling Speeds for Essential Oils

Keeping up with demand

As a leader in essential oils, Young Living passed $1 billion in sales in 2016. With demand continuing to rise, their existing filling and labeling equipment just couldn’t keep up. Not only was Syntegon able to deliver the high-speed equipment that tripled the output of the 5 and 15 mL bottles, but it incorporated the other advanced technologies that Davies was looking for as well.

The HMI on Syntegon’s filling and capping machine gives much more information than those of Young Living’s other fillers, according to Davies.Syntegon Technology“The technology on this line is head and shoulders above our old lines; it’s not even close,” Davies says, pointing to the FLC’s servo technology, advanced human-machine interface (HMI), and batch data reports. “The comparison of the HMI alone—it gives so much more information than our other ones do.”

As an example of what can be done with the batch records, Davies notes how cap torque history had previously been done manually—now saving man hours by getting those reports through the batch records. “Which allows the manufacturing manager to do his reviews on what is going on with the machine throughout the day or through the week,” he says. “So if he has customer complaints, like if there’s a complaint of a leak, he can find out almost instantly, on that day, if it came off the Bosch or not.”

A typical batch data report captures all the pertinent information of a production run, Schwartzbauer notes. “It would capture any alarms, any stoppages of the machine, it captures all the recipes when things were set up or things were changed, but it also captures things like rates of the vials,” he says. “We also have a statistical checkweigh, so we’re monitoring the weights for sampling of the bottles that are going through. We’re capturing the torque data; we’re also capturing good vials vs. rejects.”

Time savings also come through automatic recipe functions, notes John Augsburger, regional sales manager—pharma liquid packaging for Syntegon. “You have the ability to save and create new recipes that you can just load at the touch of a button,” he says. “It recalls the last parameters you used for that particular product and that particular vial size. So everything is in the machine; you do not have to set up the machine over and over and dial it in.”

Return on investment

The FLC 3080 TR-EO filling machine is an eight-head piston pumping system.Syntegon TechnologyThe FLC 3080 TR-EO filling machine is an eight-head piston pumping system with statistical checkweigh, 16-head rotary screw capper, and cap vision inspection with reject station. The line uses a third-party labeler, which was sourced and integrated by Syntegon. Though the benefits over its other four fillers might seem clear, Young Living did not take the purchase decision on the FLC 3080 lightly. “It was a big jump for Young Living in terms of output and yield. But it was also a big commitment in terms of investment compared to what they were used to paying for a filler,” Augsburger says. “It’s not something that would be easy to justify if you were an engineer trying to sell it internally.”

“It was a challenge to sell it to upper management for the investment,” Davies confirms. “But I think now that they’ve seen what it can do and what it’s doing, I don’t question if it ever came up again that there’d be a problem.”

In fact, Young Living is in the process of starting another filling project with Syntegon, Davies says, though he’s not ready to share any details.

From Davis’s perspective, the service from Syntegon also plays heavily into his satisfaction. “I’ve had a long history of dealing with startup equipment and dealing with problems. My opinion is that Bosch went over and above what I’ve seen a lot of machine manufacturers do on some of our problems as far as accepting costs and working stuff out with us and timelines and meeting deadlines,” he says. “They were very, very proactive.”