What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

When purchasing new machinery for your packaging production line you need to know what questions to ask. The problem is that often times we don’t know what to ask. It is simply a matter of ‘we don’t know, what we don’t know.’ Unfortunately, what you don’t know can hurt you.

The best way to avoid costly mistakes is to find a vendor who is knowledgeable about production lines and who works for a company with a strong engineering department that can assist you. Ask them to ‘walk you through’ exactly how their machinery will work on your line and how the integration of the different machines works. Ask questions about what happens when one machine on the line goes down. How does that affect the other machines? You might be purchasing a machine that works great at the speed it was built to run at, but if you need to slow it down due to a problem with another machine, it doesn’t run well or at all at a lower speed.

Take your time in making a purchasing decision if you don’t feel you have all the answers. Ask questions of all your vendors and make sure the answers they give you make sense to you and they can show you how and why their answers are correct. You can also ask the vendor for a reference you can call and ask them what they did in a similar situation. It is always helpful to speak with someone who has done it before and can tell you what to look out for.

The author, Marge Bonura, is the Director of Sales & Marketing for New England Machinery, Inc. (NEM). NEM is a leading packaging machinery manufacturer of bottle unscramblers, cappers, orienters, retorquers, lidders, pluggers, pump sorter/placers, scoop feeders, hopper elevators and much more. The company has been in business since 1974 selling to the food, beverage, pharmaceutical, personal care, chemical, household products, automotive and other industries. For more information on NEM, visit their website at www.neminc.com.