Leading barcode and labelling company, AM Labels develops bespoke label applicator for Wine Industry

Leading barcode and labelling company, AM Labels develops bespoke label applicator for Wine Industry

Company: Kingsland Wines & Spirits was established 40 years ago and has since grown to become the largest independent bottler of wine and spirits in the UK. Based in Manchester they provide a complete solution from vine to shelf.

Challenge: Kingsland Wines & Spirits (Kingsland) already had a standard application to apply labels to wine boxes that needed modification to ensure that their labelling lines were running more efficiently. Kingsland wanted to apply labels to the front of their wine boxes containing 6 or 12 wine bottles. The previously installed label applicator had never run to their requirements and frequently failed to apply the labels often skipping numerous wine boxes.

Solution: AM Labels provided a customised label applicator to apply labels to wine boxes, the label applicator was initially supplied as a prototype and under went rigorous testing for one year to get the best result. After this testing AM Labels installed a further four label applicators to automate the rest of Kingsland’s labelling lines. The solution solved problems with previous applicators that failed to apply the labels to wine boxes properly.

Tony Mariani (MD of AM Labels) Commented: “We aim to build good partnerships with our customers, we became part of the Kingsland team… we modified the label applicator to fit their purposes and when they took the further four applicators we brought those machines up to the same standard and also supplied Zebra Z4M printers and rewinders - a complete package for their business requirements”

Company Benefits: With excellent communication and collaboration from both companies the benefits were clear to see. An increase in productivity was achieved as production lines were faster and more efficient. From this less time was spent double checking that the labels had been applied properly, the four extra labelling lines saved labour costs as less staff were needed. There was also a dramatic reduction on the costs associated with wasted labels.

Nigel Smith Company Engineering Manager at Kingsland commented on three main advantages of the new system:
1) The old method of printing cartons required 4 people across the shift patterns due to the slow manual rate at which the cartons were printed. Under the new system the printing of labels is managed by just one person as the printers can be programmed and left to run. This has allowed for three employees to be re-assigned elsewhere.
2) Under the old system of carton printing, an automatic additional 5% of cartons were printed to allow for wastage. As the information on each carton is specific to the run, any unused cartons can not be retained for future runs. Hence if the cartons are not used they still have to be scrapped. With the new application carton wastage has been reduced as all unused cartons are returned to Stores at the end of the run.
3) Taking into account the consumables that are required under each system e.g. ink and stereos compared to labels, ribbons and print heads the saving using the online label application is £20,000 per year based on 3.25 million labels.

AM Labels can also supply semi automatic or automatic bottle labellers for labelling wine bottles.

For further information or to understand how label applicators could work for your application please call sales on 01536 414222, email sales@amlabels.co.uk or fill in our online contact form

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