Orlando, Fla. — Conair had its largest and most interactive NPE presence ever with 12 product rollouts among 55 products on display.
That's a lot of new technology, and it's not all just a matter of the six-year gap since NPE2018, according to Sam Rajkovich, Conair vice president of sales and marketing. "Conair continues to invest in R&D, and our product and service offering at NPE reflects what we see in the market: plastics processors seeking competitive solutions to help cope with a labor shortage and a loss of experienced personnel," Rajkovich said in an email.
"These factors affect everything from employee training and production to equipment maintenance and planning for future growth."
In response, Conair is taking a three-prong approach to customer challenges, Rajkovich added.
"The goal, across all of our auxiliary product lines, is to incorporate more intelligence and capability information into our controls so that there's less need for operator training interaction and adjustments," he said.
Built-in help features will reduce the need for operators to have extensive experience or training with the use of auxiliary equipment, Rajkovich added.
The second part of Conair's plan has been adding personnel and products "so that processors can tap into predictable, affordable auxiliary equipment service."
"We also offer longer-term service agreements, with scheduled services aimed at the same results," Rajkovich said. "All of our customer care efforts are backed by the largest team of factory service personnel in the auxiliary equipment business."
The third prong has been expanding the Services Group to meet demand for project management and systems installation services.
"We've got a strong and growing team, with 12 experienced product managers, a skilled engineering group, four factory installation teams, and dozens of qualified contractors across 26 states, Canada, Mexico and Germany."
Q: What are you most excited about at NPE?
Rajkovich: Conair is introducing two new product options that make very practical use of artificial intelligence: our patented Conveying with Optimizer system and our ResinWorks with Optimizer system.
By automatically optimizing the conveying and central drying processes, both of these products enable even inexperienced personnel to achieve expert-level results, together with substantial labor and energy savings.
The Conveying with Optimizer demonstration is one of a dozen hands-on experiences that we'll be offering to NPE attendees. We invite processors to bring us their challenges — with conveying, drying, blending, extrusion and other processes — and to experience how Conair solutions can deliver for them.
Q: What can this generation of AI controls and products do for plastics processors?
Rajkovich: The AI technology that you'll see condenses years of equipment knowledge and test data into controls that, when connected with live equipment performance data, can rapidly and autonomously make mechanical adjustments needed to constantly optimize conveying and drying results.
The net result of AI technology is to enable the available personnel to focus on making parts, not on making auxiliary equipment adjustments. At the same time, this technology reduces labor inputs, energy consumption and material costs.
Q: Where are North American processors in this transition?
Rajkovich: I can't say for sure what phase of adoption we are in, but my belief is that AI-driven technology is here to stay and that it will continually improve production run rates into the future.
Note that the use of intelligence and automation in industry equipment is not entirely new. Conair introduced features like temperature setback and dew point control on our resin dryers more than 15 years ago. These features had some ability to use sensor data combined with programmed intelligence to make process changes without operator input to reduce energy usage, reduce the risk of overdrying resin and decrease the production of scrap parts. But the AI-driven equipment you'll see in the Conair booth at NPE2024 takes this type of intelligence to a new level.
Q: Can you give some examples of how AI is addressing conveying issues?
Rajkovich: Using AI-driven logic in Conveying with Optimizer, Conair takes manual adjustments out of the equation. Once the operator specifies the resin destination, Conveying with Optimizer does the rest, adjusting conveying parameters to optimize resin movement despite changes in bulk density, conveying distance, system wear and even vacuum leaks. The result is maximum energy efficiency, minimum equipment wear, maximum throughputs and maximum profitability. Given time, an experienced conveying operator might achieve similar results but could never calculate the settings and adjust the hardware as quickly and consistently across cycles as the Conveying with Optimizer system can.
Q: What kind of positions/roles do you see for human employees?
Rajkovich: People are always a vital element in production. Adopting AI-driven solutions for auxiliary equipment simply automates some repetitive and complicated calculations and adjustments so that processors and operators can focus on other, more important tasks, like making parts and assuring quality.
If equipment like ours can apply expert knowledge, captured in algorithms, then consider the variables and optimize auxiliary performance automatically, the impact of available human expertise in other areas is magnified.