Pump up the Jam, pump it up
– this is a story about how a soap pump should be assembled!
Rosti GP in Gislaved, Sweden is one of our very best customers. A customer who has high expectations, ambitious visions and sets demanding targets. At the same time they are ready to jump in to our boat and work together with us to reach these targets. Together we have built a production line for soap pumps that we are eager to show to the world!
A small assembled gadget made entirely out of plastic, where 4 cleverly designed, injection moulded parts together forms a precise, reliable and durable dosage pump for soap. An unpretentious component that most of us are in contact with on an almost daily basis and a component that we expect to work over and over again. But, how is it made? How have the fine mechanics been assembled and how can quality and traceability be guaranteed?
How it is made
In a newly renovated production hall with shiny floor and bright lights, 4 new all-electric injection moulding machines from ENGEL are installed together with 4 ABB robots type IRB 2600. Each machine has its own robot ready to serve. The 4 robots are connected with a pallet plastic chain conveyor where the soap pump is assembled in the pallets step by step in each station. Each machine is equipped with a 12 cavity injection mould tool and in each cycle 12 soap pumps are produced in parallel. The tolerances are tight and the process must be precisely tuned since small deviances in the injection process or variations in cooling time have a direct impact on the ability to assemble the parts together.
”Cooperation and mutual trust”
Many years of cooperation
During recent times, 3Button Group has been trusted by Rosti GP to build quite a lot of automation for the Rosti production lines. It has been a wide span of equipment ranging from Side-Entry robots from IML Technologies where high speed and precision have been in focus, to in line vision inspection and quality control systems. We have over the same period delivered more than 1km of plastic chain conveyors to transport products from the production lines to central palletizing cells, where robots palletize products layer by layer with intermediate sheets in between. Together with Rosti we have also found ways to use digital printers to print artwork directly to products and delivered assembly applications from Fröjd Automation. When we got the RFQ to assemble the soap pumps it felt right to accept the challenge even though we realized from the start that the task was difficult.
Thank you very much!
To reach the demanding targets regarding cycle time, traceability and quality combined with a lot of other demands regarding start up rejection, products for quality tests and automatic changeover between product types, would have been impossible without a close cooperation with Rosti. In the attached film we get credits from Daniel Kotur and Björn Felixsson regarding the cooperation and the way we have worked together in the project. We would here like to take the opportunity to empathise the mutual respect and trust between us and Rosti. The complete engineering team of Rosti GP are very competent, easy to work with and very helpful. We say thank you all for this very nice cooperation!