Switching to IWM was easy as pie for Holland's Pies

New equipment supplied and installed by Industrial Washing Machines (IWM) is now providing Holland’s Pies, one of the UK’s largest and most successful suppliers of savoury pies and puddings, with greatly enhanced performance, reliability and convenience in the wash area of its Accrington production plant. In addition, the compact construction of the IWM machines means that they have freed up valuable factory floor space. IWM was called in to Holland’s Pies by the company’s chief engineer, Lindsay Thwaite, who had excellent experiences of working with IWM at other sites. His original brief was to assess the performance and condition of the plant’s existing washing machines – a twin buggy washer and a carousel-type bucket/bin washer, neither of which had been supplied by IWM – and to advise on the best way of upgrading these to better meet present-day requirements. After assessing the machines, which had been in service for many years, IWM’s experts concluded that they were close to the end of their useful lives, and that spending any significant amount of money on upgrading them was inadvisable. Nevertheless, IWM put in place a number of inexpensive short-term measures to allow the machines to remain in service until budget was available to replace them. Subsequently, IWM replaced the old twin buggy washer with a new machine from its current range. Because of the exceptionally high efficiency of the current IWM products, only a single-stage washer was needed to match and even exceed the throughput of the old plant. This not only minimised the cost of the replacement machine, but also meant that it required much less factory floor space to accommodate it. A further important benefit of the new machine is that can also handle Eurobin buggy lids, which previously had to be washed manually. IWM replaced the old-style carousel bucket/bin washer with a modern in-line continuous machine. This eliminates the need for the same operator to handle both dirty and clean containers and, therefore, makes it easier to consistently achieve and maintain the high standards of hygiene that are essential in the food manufacturing sector. “IWM worked very closely with us throughout the whole project,” said Lindsay Thwaite, “and not only helped us to specify the new machines, but also to plan the new washroom layout. In addition, the IWM team worked with us to keep our old equipment going until we were able to replace it, and then to minimise disruption to our production during the installation of the new machines.” “The project was completed successfully, on time and to budget,” he continued. “The new machines are working faultlessly, and they are providing us with big improvements in throughput, washing performance and convenience.”

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