Upgrading materials handling for safety's sake

Labor cost was a key reason why captive molder Sensus Technologies Inc. (Uniontown, PA) bought its new materials handling system, but not the kind of labor cost you might first imagine. "Our utility people were climbing up ladders with 5-gal buckets full of resin to fill the hoppers," Joseph S. Fafalios, plastics/meter assembly manager at Sensus, explains. "We wanted to proactively prevent employee injury. That's the real story." Utility workers climbed ladders quite frequently at Sensus. That's because the company molds to satisfy customer orders for just-in-time programs. It uses more than 40 different resins, plus regrind, in widely varying part runs, and performs an average of seven mold changes a day on its 43 molding machines. The company's BPCS MRP-II computer system virtually runs molding, scheduling machine times and setups, and backflushing resin through the molding operation, relieving inventory.

Sensus, a growing member of the multinational BTR Group, is a manufacturer of high-precision water measurement systems and equipment for the utility industry. The company traces its roots back more than 135 years. It manufactures automatic meter reading systems, meters, and accessories--products that support measurement, control, and data collection. Its products are guaranteed to deliver flawless service and value, year after year. Captive injection molding of precision gears and larger internal components is but one part of the vertically integrated Sensus operations in Pennsylvania. It has, for example, a bronze foundry onsite at its 255,000-sq-ft facility. With 500 employees to care for, worker safety is more than merely a set of procedures for doing business.

But Sensus is business minded, especially when it comes to capital investment. Two years ago, two consultants were brought in to evaluate whether or not Sensus should even be in the molding business.

It has molded its own parts since 1964. Richard Burkovich, senior supervisor of the molding area and the man in charge of mold development, has been there right from the beginning. Both consultants agreed that the company would be better off keeping molding inhouse. Both were that impressed with its high-quality yield. With Burkovich and Rick Zozula, manufacturing engineer at Sensus, Fafalios had already attended NPE '94 to look for a vendor of a special kind of system, one that would allow the company to transfer materials into containers that could be brought to its machines. "We can't have 40+ silos," Fafalios jokes. Sensus had three key requirements for selecting a vendor:

The system they developed has been up and running on the company's 25 larger tonnage presses since October 1996. Since that time, a minor fuse problem has been the only trouble Sensus has encountered. "We ran trials trying to see how much carbon-filled material we could run before we jammed up the filters. There were no problems," Fafalios says.

In addition to proactively preventing employee injury, the Comet system also has played an important role in Fafalios' continuing setup reduction program. The molding area presently runs five days a week in three shifts, generally at 80 percent uptime, with only five machine operators per shift (90 percent of its machines run automatic). Productivity gains have convinced Fafalios to upgrade his Comet material handling systems next year to work with Sensus's 18 smaller tonnage, vertical injection presses, which mold precision gears. Meanwhile, worker safety is still the real story. "Safety is not a procedure, it's a value, a personal value." Fafalios is emphatic on this point.

Safer Materials HandlingSensus Technologies partnered with Comet Automation Systems to develop its labor-saving automated materials handling system for about half of the 40+ resins it molds. Stainless steel bins are filled with resin from gaylord boxes by an automatic dumper and are forklifted onto a rack. A piping system with ball valves gravity feeds materials into plastic roller-mounted bins from Spaltech International. These bins are then rolled to vacuum loading systems that transfer materials overhead through aluminum piping into the appropriate cart-mounted dryers at appropriate machines. From the dryers, material is conveyed to small, interchangeable stainless steel machine hoppers. There are two drops per machine, one for virgin and one for regrind. Virgin and regrind are properly proportioned prior to feeding into the barrel through hopper magnets from Bunting Magnetics. Allen-Bradley controllers with easy-to-use touch screen interfacing control conveying. In addition to other equipment, Comet also supplied carts to Sensus that can be used to make its existing pre-Comet dryers from other manufacturers as portable as Comet dryers for off-line drying, or for traveling with molds from machine to machine.