Schumacher Packaging Group was founded in 1948 and is headquartered in Ebersdorf, Germany. The company is one of the largest European manufacturers of custom-made corrugated and solid board packaging. Hendrik and Björn Schumacher are the third generation to run this family business, which has a total of 29 production facilities in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Great Britain and the Netherlands.

The company has recently installed two EXPERTFOLD 110 e-commerce versions in each of their production plants in Hauenstein and Schwarzenberg. “These folder-gluers are extremely flexible, high-performance machines operating in three shifts, 24 hours a day, five days a week. With our EXPERTFOLD 110 folder-gluers, it’s easy to switch between solid and corrugated board. For us, this sets BOBST machines apart from the competition,” explains Hendrik Schumacher, Managing Partner of Schumacher Packaging GmbH (pictured above with Volker Claus, Sales Manager Bobst Meerbusch, at left).

The e-commerce version has two features that distinguish it from the standard edition. Firstly, it has a GYROBOX module (pictured below) that can rotate blanks up to 180° in any direction between two folding operations. Secondly, the distance travelled by the boxes from the gluing station to the delivery is longer. This ensures that the glue has time to set, even at high machine speeds. The resulting bonds are guaranteed to give the blanks the necessary stability.

GYROBOX improves reliability

“For the past few years, the demand for packaging which requires a 90° rotation during the folding-gluing process has been growing. That is why we decided to switch to the BOBST GYROBOX system four years ago,” says Schumacher.

Previously, the blanks hit a stop bar before being rotated. However, this standard approach had a serious disadvantage: the faster the machines run, the harder the blanks hit the mechanical stop. “The lighter the material and the faster the speed, the more unreliable the mechanical process became”, reports Schumacher.

GYROBOX, on the other hand, rotates the blank with absolute precision without stopping the box flow. Schumacher: “The BOBST rotating module ensures a steady box stream movement throughout the machine. The result is a more controlled folding-gluing process, less prone to disruption. That’s why we can run our machines at faster speeds, enabling much higher productivity. It also means that we are less dependent on the substrate grammages and the stiffness of the blanks.” 

PLUS, PRODUCTIVITY HAS ALMOST DOUBLED.