Masimo is a global medical technology company that develops and produces a wide array of industry-leading monitoring technologies, including innovative measurements, sensors, and patient monitors. Powered by the Masimo Hospital Automation™ platform, Masimo connectivity, automation, and telehealth and telemonitoring solutions are improving and automating care delivery both in the hospital and beyond. In addition, Masimo is home to an expanding array of consumer health and wellness solutions like the Masimo W1™ health tracking watch and Stork™ baby monitor, as well as sound devices from legendary audio brands like Bowers & Wilkins® and Denon®.
The Challenge
With the expansion into consumer health and wellness products, the team at Masimo strived to improve the aesthetics and sturdiness of the packaging of their products. Specifically, the design team wanted to include a plastic shrink wrap around the box to provide a sleek look and feel to the product while also protecting the box during shipping.
Shrink wrapping is a common packaging technique in the consumer electronics industry, but Masimo had never performed this process, and had no internal talent or experience in developing a shrink wrap process. Manual processes proved costly and error-prone, so the process engineering team sought out to implement a fully automated shrink wrap process to increase output and ensure consistency.
The requirements for shrink wrap packaging are:
- Shrink the plastic wrap without any cosmetic defects such as tears, wrinkles, and voids.
- Minimize the size of “dog ears,” which are excessive triangular pieces of plastic that degrade the cosmetic quality of the product and make it more difficult to open, to a maximum length of 0.060.”
- Minimize the amount of material used to achieve (1) and (2).
The heat shrinking equipment that Masimo purchased consists of two units that operate sequentially: the first unit wraps the heat shrinking material around the product package, while the second unit shrinks the wrapping. The first unit comprises three numeric factors that control the amount of material used:
- The bag length.
- The film advance rate.
- The depth of the table which defines the wrap length.
The second unit heats and shrinks the plastic and consists of two numeric factors:
- Sealing time.
- Sealing temperature.
How Minitab Helped
Overview
- Founded in 1989
- Headquartered in Irvine, California
- Specializes in health technology and consumer electronics
Challenge
Automate and optimize their shrink wrap packaging process to enhance aesthetics and consistency, specifically through the removal of “dog ears” from their boxes.
Products Used
Minitab® Statistical Software
Results
- Improved measurement system accuracy using Gage R&R analysis
- Automated shrink wrap process successfully
- Achieved target dog ear length, enhancing packaging quality