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Automated Stacker, Bander Picks Up Manual Slack for OTC Manufacturer

Reese Pharmaceutical improves packaging line productivity by 25% through stacking and banding automation.

Madison Banders AP-25.
Madison Banders AP-25.

In early 2020, understaffing was a challenge for many manufacturers as the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread like wildfire. But in addition to this worldwide issue, everyday staffing issues were already leading to low productivity for Reese Pharmaceutical Company—a privately held manufacturer of OTC branded and private label products selling to national and regional chains, food and grocery stores, drug wholesalers, co-ops, and independent pharmacies.

In 2019, the Cleveland-based company’s secondary packaging line was fully automated, except for the end of the line, where finished product bundling and shrink-wrapping were still done manually by a two- to three-person team. Each bundle was oriented, stacked, and banded by a human technician. This forced the line to operate at 60% to 70% of its throughput capacity versus the 80% to 85% that was possible if the line could run at the full speed afforded by automation. Three main issues caused this decrease:

  • A bottleneck in the manual carton stacking component, which couldn’t keep up with the 18,000 to 20,000 unit per day production, resulting in frustrating downtime
  • Changes to usual staffing arrangements due to illness, position changes, and other staffing issues, leading to understaffing of the manual component
  • Realizing the huge importance of solving these problems, Reese researched possible equipment solutions, but struggled initially to find anything already on the market.

Assuming there was no existing solution, they turned to the more expensive and headache-inducing option of arranging a custom solution that could automate the processes involved and integrate with the existing line—a process Reese’s operations manager, Jeff Reese, referred to as, “a big mess.”

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“Going custom would have been tough and expensive. We didn’t have any machines like the one we needed,” he said. “There would have been a lot of head-scratching and legwork to design and build something from the ground up. It would have put a lot back on our plate given how much we’d have to be involved.”

Not only would this process have been slow and demanding, but there would be no guarantee that the custom machine would operate successfully once installed.

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