Gebo Cermex has commissioned two end-of-lines for production of shampoo and conditioner in shaped bottles at Unilever’s new personal care facility in Dubai. The new two packaging machines meet the Unilever’s requirement for a new technology that combines a modular design, ensures faster, shorter, and highly responsive production lines to reduce lead-time to market.
Gebo Cermex said it has provided an array of equipment, from robotic product collation to shrink-wrapping and palletising. With capacity of 350 products/minute, the new high speed lines are capable of handling eight different container formats with a large scope of sizes ranging from 100ml to 900ml, and allow multiple changeovers per day in maximum ten minutes.
The Unilever’s factory in Dubai is equipped to produce about 500 million items dealing with hair and skincare products under the Dove, Fair & Lovely, Lifebuoy, Vaseline, Clear, TRESemme and Sunsilk brands, annually. For the facility, Gebo Cermex has delivered 19 machines across the different production lines, including packers and shrink-wrappers for premium pots of skin cream or tubs of facial cream in cartons.
Unilever strategic key account director at Gebo Cermex Jean-Philippe Beduneau said: “Our existing portfolio is also able to respect the specifications typically linked to shaped, unstable bottles. “Nevertheless, in the Unilever case, their expectations about line speed and maximum time for changeovers challenged our design department to stretch the boundaries of the current range and merge modules and technologies like we never did before.”
Additionally, Unilever selected the product management through six robots, using FlowDesigner, the Gebo Cermex flow management and product tracking intelligence to ensure gentle bottle handling and continuous batch preparation. Beduneau added: “From very complex projects to most cost-driven ones, we have a large portfolio of adapted handling/infeed modules, a wide robotic capability with an extensive gripping tooling design know-how, and a comprehensive approach to end-of-lines with packing, shrink-wrapping, palletising and AGV solutions.”
