Southend-on-Sea, UK-based Cumberland Packaging Ltd are a well-established independent sheet plant, producing corrugated and solid board boxes, converted polystyrene, and other foams.
Over recent years, Cumberland had invested heavily in volume production machinery, but had the need to increase short to medium run capacity. They were impressed by the performance and support for their MultiNova MN400 folder gluer installed in 2019, so they turned again to Kolbus Autobox for a short to medium run solution.
John Watson, Managing Director, and Mark Bennett, Production Manager, visited Kolbus Autobox’s manufacturing facility Houghton Regis in September last year. They were impressed by the infrastructure and build process, with a large percentage of parts being made in-house. The Autobox AB300, Multicut MC300, and Table Feeder TF300 were demonstrated with a wide variety of jobs trialled and completed with ease. Previously operating a rotary slitter and beam slotter combination, Cumberland Packaging saw benefits in the 60 sec set times and average run speeds of 500 boxes per hour.
The new machine installation was completed on schedule earlier this month and training started on day two. Jobs that were originally taking all day were being completed in less than two hours. Also, shifting the work from tooled die-cutters on to the Autobox equipment meant that set times were almost 30 mins faster, without the need for tooling.
Arran Sethi, Director of Sales, Kobus UK, said, “The Table feeder enables the high traction belts to pull in the bottom sheet from a pile allowing single operator use. The new installation is completing jobs in a quarter of the time with better quality. This has enabled Cumberland to not only support their current database of customers but service more companies who need smaller run lengths of bespoke size boxes, turned around quickly.
