From Single Machines to a Complete Production Line
COFCO Group, one of China's largest state-owned grain and food processing conglomerates, adopted Ecronic's first fully automated packaging line in 2012. It's the deployment that took our weighing and bagging equipment out of standalone-machine territory and into complete, engineered production lines — the model every large-scale line since has followed.
The Brief
Through the 2000s, Ecronic's business centered on individual weighing and bagging machines — the DCS-50 electronic scale, introduced in 2004, and the dual-scale DCS-50FB1 that followed in 2009. Customers bought the scale, the bagger, and the conveyor as separate purchases and integrated them on their own factory floor.
A partner at COFCO Group's scale needed something different: bag feeding, weighing, filling, sealing, and conveying engineered as one continuous system from the start, not assembled after the fact from parts bought separately.
Our Approach
We built on the automated packaging line prototype our engineering team had developed in 2010, keeping the same DCS-series scale technology already proven in the field at its core, and engineering the automation around it rather than bolting automation onto an existing scale as an afterthought.
Key elements of the line included:
- Precision DCS-series weighing at the core of the line, not a separate add-on station
- Automatic bag feeding, filling, and sealing in one continuous sequence
- Integrated conveying between each stage, removing manual handoffs between machines
- A line architecture designed to be replicated and scaled for future large-volume deployments
What Changed
The COFCO deployment became the reference architecture Ecronic has repeated in every large-scale line since: precision metering at the core, with automation engineered around it from the outset. It's the same line logic behind the QZB-600M2 automatic packaging machine running in facilities today, and the direct predecessor to the large-scale automated rice packaging line Ecronic delivered for Yihai Kerry in 2015, running at 1,000 tons a day.
Most importantly, it proved the fully-automated-line model at industry scale — the point where Ecronic stopped selling machines and started building lines.
“This was the deployment where we stopped selling machines and started building lines — the architecture behind every large-scale system we've delivered since.”