Case History
OLD FRIENDS,
NEW TECHNOLOGY
Calumet Diversified Meats of Kenosha, Wisconsin is a company that, with the help of two APC Saws, one APS 200 and more than 12 AEW THURNE 400 bandsaws, has become one of America's leading suppliers of pork chops and other premium pork products for the HRI market.
Calumet and AEW THURNE enjoy a strong friendship, and to ensure we continue building on our mutual success, we've introduced them to some new technology a Sortaweigh Optimiser to help them make even more of their two hard working APC Saws.
Calumet takes great pride in offering portions with a tight weight tolerance. Anything over that specified weight is giveaway so it's important to minimise it. Of course, the APC Saws do their job thoroughly, producing accurate and beautifully cut portions, but as business grows and volumes increase, the seemingly tiny giveaway figure grows accordingly.
The Sortaweigh Optimiser is linked to the APC Saws via two conveyors that take product to the Optimiser for checkweighing. Every single cut portion is automatically weighed, graded and sent to the appropriate packing station.
The system matches the portion it is weighing with others it has already placed for future packing, for example: Say, several bins of 4oz chops are nearly full, waiting for the 40th and last chop to make the mini mum bin weight as close as possible to 10lbs. If the chop that's just been weighed is 4.044 ozs, the Optimiser might make it continue past bins one, two, three and four because to put it in with these would result in a higher bin weight than if it went into bin no. five.
The result of all this is that average giveaway has been reduced by around 80 per cent a major achievement.
With this kind of improvement in productivity and profitability, it's quite clear that it really does pay to be friends with AEW THURNE.
As Calumet's Larry Becker and Jerry Klein said in the case history you can read on our website, 'APC nothing comes close.'
