Compact Carton Forming and Packing Line for M&M's Bottles

ZRAY's answer to the space constraint was to remove the buffer, not to shrink the output. **Compact carton forming module.** A minimum-footprint forming unit, sized to the available hall width, erects and glue-seals the carton directly in line. **Open-load-seal combined machine.** Instead of a separate loader and a separate sealer with a conveyor between them, opening, loading and sealing are performed in one unit. This is what frees the floor space that the carton former and case former otherwise would have needed. **Compact case forming module.** The shipper case is formed on the same short line, sized on the same principle as the carton former. **Synchronized forming control.** Because there is no buffer between the two forming steps, the line controller synchronizes them rather than letting each run on its own index. Bottle counting and grouping feeds the combined machine at a stable rate, which is what keeps the tall bottles upright through the transfers. The result is a 60 ppm bottle infeed line that fits the hall it was built into — the layout constraint is answered by integration rather than by adding conveyors.