Challenge
When Rennco, manufacturer of a full line of vertical packaging machinery and automated systems, needed a conveyor system to go with their new bagging system – the Vertic-L-PP – they did what they always do. They designed and built their own conveyor in order to provide a turnkey bagging system for their customers who launder a gamut of reusable items from bar towels to hospital gowns.
Rennco built an 18” wide Z-Style conveyor to accompany their bagging system, but soon found that the quality of the conveyor was not up to the same standards as the bagging system. The flexible belt style conveyor had tracking issues and didn’t run smoothly. Conveyors are not our strong suit,” says Robin Thurgood, V.P. & General Manager at Rennco, Homer, Michigan. After contemplating the issue, Thurgood remembered a modular conveyor he had seen at a trade show. Thurgood contacted Dynamic Conveyor of Muskegon, Michigan.
Solution
Dynamic Conveyor, manufacturers of the DynaCon® modular conveyor system, started providing a 24” wide Z-style conveyor to Rennco for use with their Vertic-L-PP bagging system. “The 24” wide conveyor gives us the flexibility to offer it with either our single or dual bagging system, which wasn’t possible with the 18” wide conveyor we were building in-house,” says Thurgood.
Results
“Ease of assembly is what we like best about the DynaCon conveyor. It is fun watching our guys put the conveyors together,” Thurgood says. In addition to ease of assembly there is a labor savings. “It used to take our guys much longer to build our conveyor in addition to having follow up issues in the field,” explains Thurgood. “It takes about two hours to assemble a DynaCon conveyor system and we have no issues in the field. The DynaCon conveyor is a more rugged system.” Thurgood believes that the savings of purchasing the DynaCon conveyors have helped Rennco keep the costs of the turnkey bagging systems better contained. In addition to the labor savings Rennco enjoys, their customers see the advantages of the flexibility offered from a truly modular conveyor system. The standard discharge height of the conveyor is 56-1/2” high, but occasionally Rennco’s customers need a different discharge height depending on the size and height of their take-away method. This information is not always known prior to installing the turnkey bagging system at the launderers’ locations. It usually isn’t until installation that Rennco discovers that the customer needs a different discharge height for their conveyor. “This is no problem with the DynaCon,” Thurgood says. “We just add a module to raise the discharge height or remove a module to lower the discharge height. This wasn’t possible with the conveyors we built in-house.”