DC Velocity - February 2014

62 DC VELOCITY FEBRUARY 2014 www.dcvelocity.com p ro b l e ms o lv e d

cushions by hand—after a machine inserted foam into a plastic bag, workers placed the packaging material on top of the television so it would expand and conform to the shape of the product. This wasn’t working well, however, because Lifetime could not create consistent cushions every single time.

Sealed Air suggested replacing the old equipment with its SpeedyPacker Insight and Instapak Molding Wheel systems. The SpeedyPacker creates the foam-in-bag material, which is then placed inside the molding wheel, which uses a mold to form a cushion that fits around a flat-screen television.

It quickly became clear that the new
system was a step up from its predeces-
sor. “We reduced damage rates by about 8 percentage
points after switching to the Sealed Air molded foam
cushions for the televisions,” says Bleuer. “At the same
time, we cut our packaging material costs by about 25
percent. I’d estimate we saw a return on our investment
in the new packaging systems within the first year.”
While Lifetime was pleased with the savings, it won-
dered if the packaging process could be automated even
further. With the SpeedyPacker and Instapak Molding
Wheel systems, Lifetime had to devote an employee
just to making the cushions—placing the bag into the
SpeedyPacker to be filled, then removing it and putting
it into the molding wheel. Automating the process
would free up that employee for other
tasks.

In late 2011 and early 2012, Lifetime installed two of Sealed Air’s new iMold systems, fully automated machines that create premolded foam cushions. The installation was successful, and now the iMold machines create 400 to 500 cushions daily for Lifetime with minimal oversight.

“We set the two iMold systems up on a mezzanine and have them pump out cushions all day for batching,” says Bleuer. “It wasn’t too much work to incorporate them into our operations once we set up the mezzanine; we just had to run a few additional power lines to the systems. Now, they’re always running—we just have the last guy in the warehouse program the systems to create a certain number of cushions before he leaves.”