Case study | August 2026

A 30,000 hL/yr craft brewery in the Pacific Northwest was hitting a wall in packaging. Their bottling line could fill 250 bottles per minute, but the case erecting station — a decade-old pneumatic machine with worn guides — kept throwing mis-folded blanks into the line. Packaging downtime was running at 11% of scheduled packaging time, and every lost hour on the filler cost more than any savings a cheap case former could deliver.

The Customer’s Pain Points

This brewery runs a mix of 12 × 355 ml and 24 × 355 ml bottles in single-wall B-flute RSC cases, plus a seasonal run of 750 ml bottles in heavier double-wall cases. Their pain was specific:

• Mis-folded bottom flaps. The old machine’s worn guide shoes let blanks slip 3–4 mm before folding. Result: roughly one jam every 25 minutes at the erector, and downstream the case packer faulted on out-of-square cases.
• No quick changeover. Switching between 12-pack and 24-pack cases meant loosening and re-tightening 14 guide bolts with wrenches. Every changeover took 35–45 minutes, and with 3–4 changeovers per packaging day, that was a full shift of lost time per week.
• Fragile seasonal runs. The 750 ml double-wall case, holding 6.5 kg of glass, occasionally came out with a bowed bottom panel — invisible at the erector, but it caused stack collapses in the warehouse two weeks later.
• Unbudgeted repair cycles. The old machine needed its flap-folding cams rebuilt every 6–8 months. Spare cams, labor, and the failed-case clean-up were booked as “maintenance,” hiding the real cost of the aging machine.

The Solution: Two ZRAY Heavy-Duty Case Formers

ZRAY’s application engineer spent a day on-site measuring the actual blank dimensions, board caliper, and case squareness targets. The recommendation was two machines, each sized for the line rather than one oversized unit:

1. A single-piece case erector with heavy-duty guides for the 12/24-pack B-flute work, running at 14–16 CPM with 40% headroom.
2. A double-head high-speed case former for the seasonal 750 ml double-wall runs, where the double-head action applies even pressure on both ends of the blank and prevents the bowed-bottom problem.

Key configuration details:

• Ground and hardened guide shoes with a wear allowance marking, so operators can visually check guide wear instead of discovering it through jams.
• Servo-driven blank feed with vacuum assist, which stops the mis-feeds caused by humidity-swollen blanks in the summer months.
• Recipe memory for 6 case sizes, with changeover done from the HMI in under 4 minutes — the 14-bolt wrench procedure is gone.
• A PLC alarm log with 200-event history, so the maintenance team can review fault patterns instead of reacting to each jam.

Results and ROI

The brewery tracked 12 months of packaging data before the upgrade and 9 months after. Here are the headline numbers:

The 35% downtime reduction translated directly into throughput: the brewery packed an extra 2,100 hL of beer in the first 9 months without adding a single packaging shift. At their average margin, that is roughly USD 95,000 of additional gross profit — versus a combined machine investment of USD 108,000.

ROI Summary

• Payback: 13.6 months (counting only the downtime and repair savings, not the extra throughput).
• Recurring benefit: ~USD 35,000–40,000/yr from reduced downtime and maintenance, plus the capacity headroom for future seasonal launches.

The Maintenance Schedule They Now Follow

Is Your Erector the Hidden Bottleneck?

If your case erecting station is responsible for more than 5% of packaging downtime, the math almost always favors replacement over repair — and the changeover savings alone can pay for a servo-equipped machine.

Send us your line speed, case sizes, and a screenshot of your downtime log, and we will show you what a ZRAY machine does to those numbers. Request a packaging downtime analysis or message us on WhatsApp at +86 13681839278.