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While making paper itself is easy enough, what companies do with it is where the complexities start.

Domtar Packaging is one of the world’s leading paper and cardboard producers. The company had a need to stamp some of the corrugated boxes it made. According to a wide variety of shipping destinations. The information was stamped onto each box using a leather die. That was the same size as one side of the box. In other words, not small.

But the stamping process had one huge hurdle to overcome. Where and how to store the many hundreds of leather dies when they were not in use. And how to quickly retrieve the individual dyes required for a particular production run.

Overhead Conveyors to the Rescue

To store the dies in a conventional way that would give workers easy access to the dies would have required a significant amount of floor space.

Bridgeveyor worked with Domtar to develop an overhead conveyor system that essentially works as a storage facility that takes up almost no floor space.

The conveyor dips down to floor level at a loading and unloading system so that individual dies can be accessed or put back into storage. A customized computer system was developed to speed up the location and retrieval of dies. An employee simply enters a location code into the computer interface. An electric “eye” system that reads the corresponding codes on the conveyor. Locates the correct die and signals the computer to run the conveyor to deliver the die to the unloading station.

Domtar’s overhead conveyor features variable speeds and a simple forward and reverses switch that allows operators to run the conveyor manually.

So making cardboard boxes isn’t as simple as it sounds – unless you use a Bridgeveyor overhead conveyor!