JBT’s Complete Spare Assembly: the innovative solution to reduce seamer downtime

Downtime can be frustrating and expensive for any food and beverage processor, but when it comes to the high-value infant powder segment, the experience can be doubly so. Keeping lines running and downtime to an absolute minimum is essential for powder processors, which is why JBT’s recently-introduced Complete Spare Assembly for JBT Seamers is proving invaluable for companies in the sector.

At its worst, downtime for a powder seamer can last 50 hours while equipment is maintained or repaired and finally brought back online, amounting to a very costly amount of lost production. As JBT’s Customer Care Manager for Filling, Closing and Sterilization, Johan Van Riet explains that the Complete Spare Assembly was borne of a desire to help customers that found themselves in this situation. 

“The Complete Spare Assembly can reduce downtime tremendously,” he says. “The idea was triggered by powder industry customers who use seamers for cans of infant formula. This is a high value product, so downtime is very costly. We have customers running seamers with 6,000 or 7,000 hour production hours per year, and they were asking what could be done to reduce downtime.”

JBT engineers started to think about how they could tackle the problem, and began to look at full assemblies and rotation kits as an answer. The result is the JBT Complete Spare Assembly which only takes an hour and a half to put in place and get up-and-running on average.

“We are talking about losing almost a complete production day per event, which is a lot of money” says Van Riet. “In terms of Return-on-Investment, that can be paid back in one to two years.”

As well as doing away with the necessity to store spare components, the Complete Spare Assembly also provides piece of mind as customers can have the confidence of having a ready-made replacement on hand should their seamer break down, continues Van Riet.

The response from the industry, he says, has been very positive, with eight customers now having a Complete Spare Assembly in place. The next step could now be the dairy industry, where Van Riet says customers have also shown a strong interest in the solution.

Learn more about the JBT Complete Spare Assembly