Fast delivery and service made FlexLink Systems the First Choice for conveyors at British American Tobacco. BAT has installed FlexLink conveyors at their Southampton production plant. The system was up and running in two weeks from order placement to delivery. “The opportunity to start  production of 400 packs as well as 200 arose”, explains Andy Martin, Project Engineer at British American Tobacco at the time of the installation.

Minimal downtime for high-volume production
“We needed conveyors to connect the new machines and have the flexibility to be able to change from 200 to 400 production. Previously we were case packing manually. Our objective was to install a system with minimal down-time and extremely short lead times.” After investigating various options, we chose FlexLink conveyors for the rapidity of delivery and service and the versatile nature of the products. From order placement to delivery, the system was up and running in two weeks causing minimum downtime.

Adjustable wedge installed over a weekend
An adjustable FlexLink XM wedge system was built and installed in the production hall that elevates the boxes of cigarettes from the packaging machine. Here, they are cased either as 200 packs and re-directed, or transported on a FlexLink XM overhead conveyor line to the packaging area for 400 packs. The cigarette boxes are re-orientated, packed in cardboard boxes and fed on to the newly installed XB line. The boxes are bar-coded and sent for export.

“Fast delivery was an important factor”, continues Andy Martin. Working together with FlexLink, we had the wedge system installed over a weekend with minimal disruption. The overhead conveyor was an existing line and re-configured it to suit our needs. The rest of the FlexLink equipment was supplied in component form and built here. Lead times were crucial and it was vital that the system we installed was reliable with minimum maintenance.

Customer benefits
One of the great features of the system is the flexibility of the wedge conveyor, which by a simple winding motion of a specially designed lever enables the system to quickly change its handling capacity between the different sizes of products. “The wedge conveyor is extremely versatile and allows very fast and reliable changeovers”, says Andy Martin. The entire cigarette manufacturing process, from raw leaves, the blending of the tobacco and manufacture and packaging of the finished cigarette is carried out at Southampton plant. “Dealing with large volumes of products, it was vital that we choose the best system available. It had to be robust and extremely reliable”, says Andy Martin.