New Marking System Aids Roofing Shingle Producer

Producing roofing shingles in 30 different colors, getting them into the right bundles, marking them clearly without errors, and moving them out to national retail outlets like Home Depot is not a simple operation.

When GAF Materials Corp. decided last year to move from its post-production bundle hand-stacking operation to prepare shingles for shipment-modernizing the whole system by changing over to shrink-wrap bundle palletiz- ing-it rapidly concluded that one of the key elements in the process was an updated marking system. Because it had been using Matthews International's older ink-jet marking equipment to mark the heavy gauge Kraft paper holding the shingles, it turned to Matthews again to determine how it would make the switch to effective marking of the polyethylene shrinkwrapped bundles.

After the changes occurred, five key benefits emerged: improved marking legibility, elimination of human errors in coding, 67o increase in processing speed, lower labor time, and easier maintenance.

There was no question that printing clearly on plastic was a challenge, especially since even the previous system had needed some improvements. Smudging was the problem.

"But newer technology in Matthews equipment could solve that," said David Ortiz, shingle line supervisor at the lead plant in Fontana, Ca., one of several across the U.S. "What we needed was a system that could eliminate human error."

He explained that under the former system, when the wrong code was used on the bundled shingles, "the next person to see the mistake was the forklift driver, but that was after 30 minutes when 15 pallets had gone by. That was a loss of time and money, and because of this plus other inefficiencies, we decided to change over to the new plastic shrinkwrap system and superior marking system.

"Also, when we made a color change of bundled shin(Please turn to page j6)

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