The manufacturer Best World International is conquering the global market from Singapore with its premium products in the high-quality cosmetics sector. The company has invested in an agile and sustainable monobloc bottling line for its filling and packaging processes to ensure that it can continue to operate cost-efficiently and flexibly in the future.
Best World International, based in Singapore, has specialised in the development and distribution of high-quality skin care products, body care, health and wellness since it was founded in 1990. With its numerous subsidiaries, the multiple award-winning cosmetics manufacturer has not only developed into an important regional player in the industry, but its luxury cosmetics are now also in demand far beyond the Asian region in North America, the Middle East and Europe. As these are extremely expensive cosmetic products, Best World attached great importance to minimising waste from the filling media and preventing any damage to the sensitive products and packaging as part of the automation plans. In addition, the new system should be very flexible thanks to fast and, above all, simple format changes to cover a wide range of formats now and in the future.
„The relevant product portfolio at Best World currently comprises eleven different filling media of varying viscosities, which have to be filled in five plastic and two glass bottle formats. A single format can in turn contain up to three individual components such as bottle, pump and baffle lid„, explains Heiko Steinbach, Project Manager at Schubert Cosmetics. Another challenge was to reliably ensure the high filling accuracy of very small quantities of 15 millilitres per batch size up to 118 millilitres in the planned fully automatic filling and packaging line.
Together with the Best World team, led by Lim Sze Huey, Group Manager Product & Quality, the German packaging machine specialist designed the new system as the successor to its agile vision system, which has already made a name for itself in the field of highly complex filling and packaging processes in the cosmetics industry. „This innovative concept was a perfect fit for our constantly growing product range, which has positioned itself in the premium segment with its brands for skin and body care, beauty, health and wellness,“ says Huang Ban Chin, Chief Operating Officer at Best World International, explaining the decision in favour of this collaboration.
Based on the tried-and-tested TLM system components from Schubert the new packaging line demonstrates its flexibility and agility above all through fast format changeovers, a very high format variety and low format costs. The entire filling and packaging process is integrated extremely compactly into a single line. The basis for the particularly simple and cost-attractive format changes is 3D printing.
In the compact system, the plastic and glass bottles are cleaned, precisely filled, sealed and packed in pre-glued automatic sideload folding cartons in directly consecutive steps. The high demands on the completeness and integrity of the products and packaging are ensured by several camera systems, which check the products at various points in the process and sort them out if necessary without disrupting the ongoing packaging process.
The system also impresses with its high filling accuracy of plus/minus one per cent, even with particularly high-viscosity cosmetic products, even in the small quantity of 15 millilitres and at an output of up to 100 bottles per minute. The Schubert experts rely on progressive cavity pumps, which have already proven themselves as dosing systems in many similar projects. This applies to all eleven formats with the various filling media and cosmetics that are currently processed on the machine.
In an upstream cleaning process, the inside of the bottle is blown out with filtered air and at the same time impurities such as dust particles are extracted using a vacuum before the bottles are fed to the filling station. This has two filling stations, each with eight filling points. In normal operation, only one of the two filling stations is active at any one time, so that the second system can be cleaned at the same time during ongoing production. Both the progressive cavity pumps for dosing and the filling points in the new Best World system can be operated in accordance with the CIP standard (Cleaning in Place) can be cleaned and sanitised without time-consuming disassembly (disinfection process to significantly reduce the number of germs). The corresponding CIP system was already planned by Schubert during the development phase and is already firmly integrated.
A sophisticated error and quality control system ensures that containers and components that do not meet Best World's requirements are removed from specially defined rejection lanes. This is done, for example, if the filling quantity is too low or too high, if the format is incorrect or if there are defects on the outer surface of the bottles, low closure torques or broken components. At the same time, the Transmodul transport robot is refilled with faultless products via a storage/intermediate table. If necessary, „good“ bottles are also selected in this step for more precise IPC (In Process Control) quality control.
Before being packaged ready for dispatch, the bottles are packed in an automatic sideload folding carton, which is serialised to further optimise the packaging process. The corresponding component barcode of the cardboard packaging (i.e. whether the correct packaging material is being used) is checked using a barcode scanner. For this purpose, an alphanumeric bottom imprint is applied to the folding boxes before they are loaded with the products. The bottles are only packed into the folding cartons once this has been visually detected as correct. The shipping cartons also receive a corresponding serialisation imprint, which is visually checked for correctness. In the event of incorrectly sealed cartons, a sliding register ejects the individual cartons via a separate discharge chute.
Thanks to 3D printing via the Schubert „Partbox“ platform, the cosmetics manufacturer is also able to print spare parts or new format parts itself. With a few exceptions, all interchangeable parts can be easily reproduced in this way. In addition to the trays for the containers in this application, this also includes the grippers for the pipettes. Delivery times to Singapore and storage costs for the customer are significantly reduced. „3D printing on demand opens up many new possibilities for new formats. We have already experienced how convenient this is during the joint development of the trays for feeding the individual components of our current bottle formats,“ says Eddie Lai, Deputy General Manager for the Best World production facility, welcoming this sustainable form of added value. With the new system, the company can rely on the rapid implementation of future formats and a further reduction in time-to-market.
