Confiserie Bosch in Uhingen/Germany is benefitting greatly from a new multihead weigher from Ishida which automatically weighs and packages breakable confectionery. Before, an employee packing the confectionery manually could barely manage two cycles per minute. Now, the new weigher completes 60 cycles per minute.

The company claim of Confiserie Bosch in Uhingen is “Manufactury for enjoyment”. The traditional Swabian company has recently begun combining handcrafting in production with high tech in packaging. An Ishida CCW-RV-GS multihead weigher now conducts high performance packaging of breakable “Wibele” biscuits and other fragile confectionery for the company. The fully automated solution represents an enormous increase in efficiency and enables growth.

“Wibele” is a traditional Swabian sweet baked product, and Confiserie Bosch is the largest German manufacturer of this speciality. Since ownership of the company changed hands in 2010, it has enjoyed rapid growth. This growth is impressively expressed by the company’s headquarters newly built in 2018, along with a factory tour transparent glass production facility and a visitor centre on the outskirts of Uhingen. The move from the company’s former 150-year old headquarters became inevitable due to capacity bottlenecks, according to CEO and company owner Wolfgang Hellstern. He reports: “Sales have doubled in recent years, and we weren’t able to keep pace with production”. The heart of the new building is the production area where Wibele biscuits are manufactured as the undisputed top seller, along with pralines, gelatine confectionery, brittle egg and chocolate fruits.

Wibele biscuits are only millimetres in size and are made in shoe sole form. Confiserie Bosch manufactures these baked goods as a premium product demanding the very highest in quality, so it equally requires a perfect appearance in the packaging, and breakage absolutely must be avoided. Up to now, the Wibele had been packaged manually, a procedure offering little flexibility and necessitating numerous hands.

Wolfgang Hellstern remembers: “Particularly during peak season times, we experienced bottlenecks, and employees unable to work had fatal effects on production”. He decided to undertake an unusual experiment and spent an entire night filling the bags by hand himself. “When I saw the disappointing result the next morning, it was clear to me that we do a great deal of manufacturing by hand at Confiserie Bosch, but for packaging we need a mechanical solution”.

The Wibele and other Confiserie Bosch products are very fragile, so they represent a special challenge for a fully automated packaging process. The product requirements document described a multihead weigher that could work quickly, precisely and, most importantly, in a manner that would protect the products. Mr Hellstern elaborates: “Prior to the investment decision, we made various production visits during which we witnessed weighers from Ishida at work and were able to gain an impression of the technology involved”. The optimum solution for Confiserie Bosch was the new CCW-RV-GS series, specially developed for processing breakable products.

Modernization of the company’s packaging began in March of 2019 with the installation of the new 14-head weigher on a podium in the middle of the production hall. The products are fed in by an ascending conveyor and a transport belt. The confectionery is positioned on the weigher’s distribution plate and transported by vibrating feeders to round, double opening bowls. Simultaneously, in fractions of seconds, the software determines the three best combinations, analyzes them again and selects the one that comes closest to the target weight, all in one weighing cycle. This ensures the prevention of dropping errors along with maximum precision and continuity. The Anti-Floor-Vibration-System protects the weighing cell from shocks emanating from the production environment.

Moderate slopes, flat angles, minimum falling heights and the arched design of the bowls create a highly product preservative product flow. The bowls and the discharge funnel are padded with removable plastic inserts. The discharge hopper features only a mild slope for gentle handling of the products, and, in its interior, a special ring lock prevents product collisions. The products are then discharged from the receiver bowl in precisely dosed product portions directly into the tube bags.

Now, Confiserie Bosch is packaging half of its product portfolio with the multihead weigher, roughly 80 products. Changeovers are easily conducted at the press of a button several times each day using presets. The bags have filling weights of between 40 and 200 g. The weigher reaches a speed of 60 cycles per minute with a precision rating of 0.1 g. In comparison, the manual packaging previously done at the company by employees produced only two cycles per minute per worker. Wolfgang Hellstern explains: “This enormous increase in performance represents a huge cost saving and amortises the investment”. Yet, the most decisive criterion has proven to be the highly preservative processing without which the automation would not have been possible. Today, Confiserie Bosch can conduct its manufacturing in a far more flexible manner and accept orders that it was once forced to decline.

The weigher also provides the company with even more process optimization possibilities. The CCW-RV-GS model is compatible with Industry 4.0 technology. The web based Sentinel software enables the correspondingly preconfigured weighers to connect with Ishida’s service facilities to monitor their performance. There, the production data is gathered and analyzed in real-time. Daily reports provide information then on trend values, batch sizes and statistics, and disruptions or performance drops are recognized early and can be repaired remotely.