Efficient line design and eye-catchy bottles as the basis of success
Mr Khalifa Khalid Al Rabban, chairman of Rayyan Water, notes: “With our exceptionally high standards in respect to hygienic production processes and quality of the bottles, coupled with our mission to minimise our environmental footprint, we were eager to achieve an efficient design of the line as well as incorporate all the next-generation tech options that Sidel could offer. We needed to accommodate three different bottle formats, 250, 500 and 750 ml across still and sparkling water, in varying pack configurations.”
Sidel’s globally renowned line engineering expertise proved key when designing the new complete glass line at the Doha plant, offering full protection for the product both in terms of hygienic and organoleptic aspects. This step was particularly challenging as Rayyan decided to install this line in an existing area of the plant, therefore facing considerable space constraints. With projected output at 8,000 bottles per hour (bph), this line has been designed to accommodate any potential upgrade.
The Qatari water bottler wanted the new glass bottles to stand out on the shelves as sleek and elegant as possible without compromising the performance of the line. This is where Sidel’s long-standing packaging capabilities came into play. In less than 25 days, the company’s designers, engineers and material experts – in close collaboration with the customer – industrialised bottles with a chic, elegant and classically European look, proposing the most aesthetically pleasing dimensions and types of plastic labels to be applied on the neck and the body of the bottle.
Rayyan chose Sidel’s proven Roll Adhesive labeller, designed to handle labels with increased efficiency, while ensuring great stability and precision in the process. Ensuring high flexibility and labelling quality, it can process a wide variety of containers of different shapes and sizes. Importantly, to accommodate any future shifts in their production needs, Rayyan chose a configuration featuring three labelling stations to apply up to three labels on one single bottle, without any impact on the performance of the line.
Maximum agility with no compromises on product care
On top of highly efficient line design and careful line regulations, the complex shape and fragile material of the Rayyan bottle required Sidel to install Gebo advanced conveying solutions at the Doha plant, ensuring reduced downtime, agile production and perfect bottle quality. Starting with AQFile: this reliable, single file accumulation system, with nearly no limitation on types of packaging material, shape and size, delivers great efficiency and ease of operations to Rayyan, together with unique versatility. The latter one is ensured by the possibility for immediate adjustment of the accumulation size to production needs, coupled with minimum settings required for format changeovers. With its low friction and mechanical constraints, Gebo AQFile also brings maintenance costs down to the bare minimum, contributing to an optimised TCO.
In addition, with multiple bottle formats and case configurations to manage, Rayyan decided to leverage Sidel’s 360° approach to wrap-around mechanisation, underpinned by gentle primary packaging handling and extended secondary packaging knowledge, demonstrated by more than 1,200 machines installed worldwide. Therefore, the Qatari company opted for the Cermex WB46 wrap-around case packer, offering excellent performance in terms of flexibility, hygiene and ergonomics due mainly to a new automation platform, thermoplastic polyurethane timing belts and quick-release systems for format changeovers.
After a mass flow accumulation, the bottles are distributed into lanes by an alternative vibrating device ensuring a soft packer feeding. Then, due to their complex shape, they are transferred to the cases by a Pick and Place movement. This helps maintain the batch’s perfect configuration at all times. Combined with a motorised infeed conveyor, the bottle accumulation is performed without pressure.
A specific feature in the Rayyan line set up allows for the arrangement of labelled bottles either to the clustering machine or directly to Cermex WB46, which is able to handle loose bottles and manage them also in large-size cluster configurations. Additionally, for greater uptime, this wrap-around case packer features the company’s brand-new, user-friendly human machine interface (HMI), which is based on an intuitive, tablet-approach navigation and offers rich media tools for preventive maintenance procedures.
Operational intelligence to support continuous improvement
Harbinder Kathuria, Vice President Beverages Equipment Sales Middle East, Africa & India at Sidel adds, “Rayyan is focused on continuous improvement and relentlessly looking for decreasing unplanned downtime, reducing waste and costs, and increasing the plant’s output. This is why our EIT® (Efficiency Improvement Tool) came as the natural choice. This market-leading data acquisition and plant intelligence system is a universally proven solution, automatically recording 24/7 raw production data, calculating a wide array of KPIs to help measure performance, analysing production issues, detecting efficiency loss sources and performing root cause analyses. Currently installed in more than 70 countries, EIT gives employees at all levels of the organisation real-time access to relevant and actionable information on production-related issues.”
[1] The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) includes The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Yemen.
[2] Zenith Global Ltd 2017
