In the first in a series of customer focus days, Heye International welcomed senior production experts from the Stölzle group to Obernkirchen, Germany recently to discuss their development priorities.
Stölzle has emerged as an important customer for hot and cold end equipment in recent years, and members of Heye’s technical team were on hand to discover the customer’s current and future priorities.
Ten senior members of Stölzle’s multinational production team attended the meeting, where Gerd Müller, Stölzle Cold End Manager, presented the group’s latest developments, including the creation of a centre of excellence for cosmetic flacons at the Masnieres plant in northern France.
As well as discussing best practice solutions for the glass container production process, the workshop addressed inspection priorities for the future.
This included a debate about which cold end inspection functions could be moved to the hot end, the elements required in the ‘ideal’ inspection machine and the potential for automatic job changes.
The value of a blue-sky development to check the visual features of cosmetics flacons was also emphasised.
Stölzle operates 37 production lines at six manufacturing sites in Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Poland and the UK, as well as three specialist decoration sites.
It employs 2200 throughout the world and produces 2.6 billion glass containers every year.
