Tray Former OEE: Blank Feed, Glue and Feeding the Tray Packer

Key takeaways

• A tray former's typical losses are blank misfeeds, forming jams, glue clogs and a blank magazine running empty.
• Trays that are out of square or have open corners are its Quality loss, often found only at the tray packer.
• Blank quality is a material cause; give it its own code.
• Its stops reach the tray packer only when they outlast the buffer of formed trays.
• Glue clogs are usually rare but long, so they cost the most.

Tray former OEE measures the machine that folds flat corrugated blanks into open trays and glues them, usually for shrink wrapped trays or retail ready displays: how long it runs, how close to its rated speed, and how many good trays it makes. Its usual losses are blank misfeeds, forming jams, glue clogs and an empty blank magazine.

Fabrico, an OEE and light MES platform, logs each stop with its reason and keeps own stops apart from starved and blocked time. This guide covers where the tray former's time goes, how to measure each factor, how its stops travel to the tray packer, and a worked shift.

Where does the tray former's time go?

The blank and glue problems are close cousins of those on a case packer; our case packer OEE guide covers the packer's own magazine and glue stops.

How do you measure Availability, Performance and Quality on a tray former?

• Availability = run time / planned production time. Own faults reduce it; in the full view, so does blocked time.
• Performance = trays formed / (run time x rated trays a minute). Set the rated speed per tray format.
• Quality = good trays / trays formed. Trays out of square, with open corners or weak glue joints count against it.

Many tray defects are only found at the tray packer, when a bad tray jams there. Record those rejects against the tray former, not the packer, so the cause stays with the machine that made the tray.

How do tray former stops reach the tray packer?

Formed trays wait on a conveyor before the tray packer. A short tray former stop drains part of that buffer and the packer never notices. A longer one empties it, and then the tray packer is starved of trays. If that lasts, product backs up toward the filler. Our guide to starvation and blocking explains how to follow a stop along the line, and shrink wrapper and tray packer OEE covers the machine after it.

What happens at a format changeover on a tray former?

A new tray size means a new forming head or mandrel, new blank guides and new glue positions. Measure from the last good tray of the old format to the first good tray of the new one at rated speed. Change parts on a trolley, settings recorded per format and glue positions marked are the usual first wins; our SMED guide explains the method.

A worked shift on a tray former

Sample line (illustrative numbers, not a customer): a tray former rated at 33 trays a minute, feeding a tray packer that uses 30 a minute. The conveyor of formed trays holds 60 trays, or 2 minutes. The shift has 450 minutes of planned production time.

• Availability = 405 / 450 = 90.0%.
• Performance against its rated speed = 30 / 33 = 90.9%, the spare speed it needs to refill the tray buffer.
• Quality: 12,150 trays formed, 180 rejected as out of square or open at the corners: 11,970 / 12,150 = 98.5%.
• Which stops starved the tray packer: only the glue clogs. Each lasted 6 minutes against a 2 minute buffer, so 4 starved minutes each, 8 in total. The misfeeds, jams and magazine runouts ended inside the buffer.

The forming jams carry the most own minutes, but the two glue clogs are what reached the next machine. Ranked by cost, the glue system goes first.

Which mistakes do plants make with tray former OEE?

• Charging bad trays to the tray packer because that is where they jam.
• No code for blank quality, so supplier and storage problems land on the crew.
• One glue code for every problem, so clogs, skips and tank refills look the same.
• Filtering out short misfeeds, so they never reach the ranking. See our guide to micro stops.
• Ranking stops by minutes instead of by what reached the tray packer.

Where Fabrico fits

Fabrico is a computer vision enabled Manufacturing Performance Platform. OEE and light MES come first: automatic downtime logging that keeps own stops, starved and blocked time apart, and OEE live by line and shift.

• The operator confirms the reason in one tap, so a misfeed, a forming jam and a glue clog get different codes.
• A camera clip as evidence for a stop, where a camera watches the forming head or the glue station.
• Losses priced in money and ranked, so the stops that reached the next machine come first.
• One view across plants for the same tray formats on different lines.

You start with a pilot on one line, with a baseline and a decision date agreed in advance. There is no free plan and there are no tiers: each plant gets a quote. See how stops are captured on our computer vision OEE page.

Frequently asked questions

How do you calculate tray former OEE?

Availability is run time over planned production time, Performance is trays formed over what it could form at rated speed, and Quality is good trays over trays formed. Multiply the three.

What causes tray former jams?

Warped, damp or badly scored blanks, double picks, forming settings that do not match the blank, and glue that skips or clogs.

Should bad trays count against the tray former or the tray packer?

Against the tray former, which made them, even when they are found at the tray packer.

When does a tray former stop the tray packer?

When it lasts longer than the buffer of formed trays between them. Short stops are absorbed.

Why does the tray former run below its rated speed?

It is usually built a little faster than the tray packer, so it can refill the tray buffer after a stop. That gap is design, not a loss.

See your tray former's losses in a demo

Bring one line and its current downtime log. We will show the tray former's stops, its rejects and what reached the next machine.

Request a demo · Contact us