Yamato Scale is a leading manufacturer of multihead weighers and checkweighers for more than 80 years now. The company offers a range of solutions for weighing, mixing or counting products which are used prior to packaging. The products can be granular, dust or small crispies that are weighed to the last milligram before ending up in a flexible pack. Yamato Scale, based in Akashi, Japan, has been in the Indian market for around a decade now and is already a leading supplier of multihead weighers in the country. At PackEx 2017 in Delhi, Packaging South Asia met Utkarsh Tyagi, senior sales executive of Yamato India, for a discussion on the company display as well as its experience at the show.
Yamato Scale had its Alpha series automatic weighing machine on display at its stand. There are various models available under the Alpha series that offer seamless working mechanism. All one needs to do is fill in the product on the overhead filler, set the target weight on the console and allow the machine to give yield the desired output. For instance, if you set the target weight at 100 grams, the machine displayed will give 80 weighments of 100 grams per minute. Similarly, variations in grammage change the number of weighments per minute and depending on the model, the speed can be as high as 600 weighments per minute on the most advanced Yamato machines that offer a 6-point simultaneous discharge.
In the Indian market, Yamato generally advises its customers to go for machines that don’t exceed 100 weighments per minute for smooth adjustment with the bagger unit which is of a different make since Yamato doesn’t make baggers. This is the optimum speed at which it is possible to rectify errors in a given time and prevent huge losses that high speeds may incur. In most Indian production units where the level of automation is not high enough to handle high speed bagging, a weighing machine with a disproportionately higher speed can disrupt operations and cause major breakdowns. Therefore, it is necessary to adjust the speed of the weighing machine to suit the speed of the bagger unit as well as other components.
Speaking on the response at PackEx 2017, Tyagi said that it was quite healthy since Yamato is quite well known in the market. Some of the major OEMs in the packaging machinery market use Yamato weighing machines although the company does not have any formal partnership with them. These OEMs are Yamato’s regular customers who buy products in bulk in order to equip their bagging and filling systems with high-quality weighing machines that the company supplies. This is an advantageous situation for Yamato India and has significantly boosted the company’s revenues. Tyagi said that with the packaging industry in India set for exponential growth in the years ahead, there have been suggestions from the company’s India office to Yamato headquarters in Akashi, Japan, for setting up an assembling unit in India as it will help the company price its products more competitively in the market.
