Fast, precise and sustainable production
12.10.2018 | Michael Birchler

On the way to the Coster production facilities, shortly after having left the Brenner highway near Trento, one could almost forget that this is a trip for work. In a picturesque setting at Lago di Caldonazzo, surrounded by wooded mountain and cliff ranges – the southern foothills of the Alps – one can find the two towns of Caldonazzo and Calceranica al Lago, which are both heavily influenced by tourism. A northern Italian paradise fit for a postcard that makes one long for a vacation.

This is not a place in which one would expect to find one of the world's leading manufacturers of aerosol and dosing packaging. However, with a total of six state-of-the-art production sites and its R&D headquarters, the technology company Coster is one of the region's largest and most attractive employers. Its products are essential packaging components for many of the goods we use every day. Coster produces aerosol valves, dispensers and spray pumps for prominent corporations that are active on the global market with internationally known brand-name products.

Coster manufactures more than 3 billion valves, pumps and dispensers annually. Along the way, Coster developed many innovations and submitted more than 220 patents. "Customer orientation is not just a buzzword for us, because most of these innovations can be traced back to specific requirements from our more than 600 customers," Zaggia emphasized. A key milestone was the first technical "bag on valve" application that was brought to market in the 1980s.

BoV consists of an aerosol valve and a welded bag. The product is in the bag while the propellant fills the space between bag and can. By pushing the spray button, the product is pressed out of the bag by the propellant and is dispensed as spray, creme or gel.

Only two employees per shift are monitoring the production. This is particularly well illustrated by the many laser-controlled transport vehicles that supply the required raw materials from the warehouse "just in time" or that transport the semi-finished goods between workstations. The seamless inline quality control and traceability of all products is equally impressive. For each end product, it is documented on which lines the individual components were made and from which batches the raw materials came that were used. Consequently, Industry 4.0 is not a new term for Coster but rather its reality for the past 30 years.

Beginning in 2003, the company relied more heavily on Netstal after ELION, the first all-electric machine series, was launched. Netstal is used when the requirements are particularly high and when precision, repeatability and cleanliness are of the utmost importance. With its Netstal machines, Coster achieves high quality, short cycle times and low production costs. Depending on the requirements, the precision parts are either produced inside or outside of a cleanroom.

"A Netstal machine is obviously very precise and completely reliable. There are also hardly any deviations between the machines. That allows us to transfer a specific mold from one machine to the next one and keep manufacturing without having to adapt any parameters," Gretter reports happily and adds that a Netstal machine permits high quality production particularly quickly and easily. In order to get the most out of the machine, Coster also took advantage of the comprehensive training options on offer at the training center in Näfels. "Through Netstal, we were also able to get to know many mould makers with which they had been working closely for years. Over the years, we have benefited a lot from the mutual transfer of know-how, which allowed us to optimize our applications even more," concluded Gretter.