why your company should be pigging

Helping Businesses Thrive in Competitive Markets

Does your company process food, drink or beverages, cosmetics, personal care or household products, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, pet food, paint, varnish or just about any other liquid or wet product?why you should be pigging

Then you’ll know it’s a highly competitive environment, where ever-changing consumer demand means you need to produce more product for less (yet faster).

But what do you have in place in your plant that effectively addresses capacity, waste and production downtime issues, and at the same time delivers an attractive return on investment (ROI)?

This is where liquid product recovery (“pigging“) comes in. And here are our top reasons why it will help you stay competitive in your industry:

1. Installing a Pigging System Increases Productivity and Efficiency

Put simply, because pigging systems help you recover more useable product from your processes, you have more product to sell. But that’s not the only way they help you increase your profits, productivity and efficiency.

Pigging systems streamline processes, reducing the effort required and making various operations a lot quicker. They can even eliminate some process stages altogether.

2. Pigging Systems Deliver an Attractive ROI

Because they massively reduce waste and increase yields along with productivity and efficiency, pigging systems deliver a high return on investment. Plus, the payback time is short.

Typically, if you choose an HPS pigging solution, your savings will pay back the initial cost of the system in a few months, and nearly always less than a year. So after the first year, it’s nearly all profit. That makes a great business case for including pigging as part of your liquid processing operation.

3. Pigging Systems Increase Yields Massively 

Increased product yield is one of the most common reason processing companies use a pigging system.why your company should be pigging

Whenever a process transfers liquid along a pipe, there’s nearly always a product residue left. Even gravity fed lines don’t evacuate all of the product. The more viscous the product, the more residue there is.

Pigging systems will help you recover nearly all this residue, as useable product. As an example, HPS installed a pigging system for a soft drinks manufacturer, who reported yield increases of approximately 4% (around 48,000 extra cans per week). Here’s more about how pigging systems increase product yields.

4. Pigging Systems Reduce Waste Processing and Transport Costs

By increasing product yields through pigging, there’s less product to send to waste. What’s more, the cleaning and changeover processes also use less cleaning fluids and water. In this way, hygienic product recovery and pigging systems directly reduce waste processing costs.

5. Pigging Reduces Labour and Cleaning Costs

Reduced labour costs are direct, quantifiable benefits of pigging and product recovery systems.

Pigging reduces the effort and resources needed to clean pipelines. It also makes cleaning and changeover times quicker.  Semi-automated and fully automated pigging systems reduce labour costs even further.

And because pigging reducing the amount of product left in the pipelines, there’s less product to remove which means less cleaning fluids and resources are required.

6. Pigging Systems Speed Up Changeovers

When companies expand product ranges, it’s often desirable to use previously dedicated pipelines. However, change over from one batch to another can account for significant product loss, increased use of water for flush outs and less productive human-resource hours.

Pigging speeds up product change-overs because it reduces the length of the wash. If there is only a slight change in product colour, flavour or perfume it is often possible to follow on immediately with the next product after pigging, eliminating the need for flushing altogether. This is a major advantage of pigging for many processes.

7. Pigging Reduces Downtime

In addition, non-pigging cleaning operations are often cumbersome, requiring different tools and processes. Pigging reduces the number of these operations. Because pigging systems make cleaning easier and faster, with more streamlined changeovers, they reduce downtime.

HPS pigging systems themselves are robust and reliable. With a properly implemented preventative maintenance programme, downtime is minimal.

8. Pigging Systems Help With Reducing Water Usage

Normally the first part of any Clean In Place (CIP) cycle is to flush out the product residue with water for a period of time before actually proceeding with the cleaning process. If most of the product has already been removed with a pig, then there’s no requirement for a lengthy flush out. This reduces water usage significantly.

9. Pigging Systems Reduce Contamination and Cross-Contamination

pigging system equipment HPS

Because of the high product recovery rates of HPS systems, the chances of product contamination and cross-contamination is greatly reduced. This, in turn, means more consistent product output, lower rework and better control over raw material and finished product inventory are among the many advantages of pigging systems.

10. Pigging Systems Offer Choice Between Increased Output Versus Achieving the Same Output (But in Less time Using Less Resources)

Installing a pigging system enables you to produce more product for less, with the same output.

Also because HPS pigging systems recover nearly all residual product in your pipeline or tubing (which would otherwise be wasted), you can use the same lines for more than one product and reduce the number of dedicated lines you have. So, you can replace many dedicated lines with a lower number of shared lines. This increases the capacity and flexibility of your operation. It also reduces the costs of new installations.

 

11. Installing a Pigging System will Improve Your Environmental Credentials

The costs of removal or treatment of waste from plants has become a major expense to many liquid processing companies. Additionally, changes in legislation and restrictions from environmental policies can require extra resources and incur further costs.

An effective way of reducing these costs while promoting carbon footprint reduction is to pig the product transfer pipelines. This significantly reduces waste and associated costs, and the environmental benefits of pigging are significant.

Liquid manufacturing companies across the world now see Carbon Footprint Reduction as a marketing tool as well as an ethical approach to business. Pigging can significantly reduce your organisation’s direct and indirect Carbon Footprint.

For example, the power resources saved by reducing cleaning times and associated waste are often considerable.  Indirectly, the reduction in numbers of tankers or trucks required for removal of waste or delivery of waste treatment chemicals also reduces things like road degradation, exhaust emissions and traffic congestion.

Speak to the Experts, We Can Solve Your Liquid Processing Challenges

If you process liquids and your company is looking to increase yields, reduce waste, reduce downtime and improve sustainability, then a pigging system is your answer.

To find out more about improving your competitiveness through product recovery and pigging, then please get in touch.

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