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Can Lines Engineering Confirms BradPower™
Modular Power Distribution
System Saves Time and Costs, Streamlines Installation of Material
Handling System Machinery
In engineering custom conveyor and packaging lines for the
world’s largest consumer goods companies, Can Lines has made
BradPower its “plug-and-play” wiring standard..
The most competitive enterprises today are constantly looking for new ways to
streamline their business processes, reduce time-to-market, and improve the quality and
cost-effectiveness of the products they deliver to customers. Can Lines Engineering, a
leading provider of material handling products and services to the food and beverage
industry, is a prime example of continuous improvement in action.
Established in 1960, Can Lines Engineering (www.canlines.com) is a privately held
company specializing in the design, development and integration of packaging lines and
conveying systems, most of which are custom-engineered to each customer’s space and
functional specifications. Headquartered in Downey, California, the firm has engineering
facilities in Greenville, Wisconsin and a manufacturing plant in Los Angeles.
Can Lines fabricates and assembles equipment that includes can, bottle, case and pallet
conveyor systems, palletizers and depalletizers, operator control platforms and line
control integration. Services encompass packaging line audits, material handling and
packaging system design, equipment installation, construction and project management.
The company’s client list includes such globally recognized consumer goods companies,
such as Anheuser-Busch, Miller Brewing, Coors, Campbell Soup, Coca Cola, Con Agra
Foods, Del Monte, Frito-Lay, General Mills, Nestle, Pepsi-Cola, Pillsbury and Unilever.
The Challenge of Engineered Systems
According to Brian Wedin, Can Lines’ Lead Electrical Engineer, Can Lines set out to
explore options for streamlining the assembly, installation and commissioning of its
custom-designed systems. “Although every client’s project is different, designing the
custom system tends to be the easier part,” he notes. “The challenge in many cases
was determining on-site how best to power the conveyor system without incurring
excessive professional electrical time and labor costs. Our goal was to find a solution
that would allow us to standardize machine power distribution in a way that would
facilitate faster, easier ‘plug-and-play’ installation.”
Because every plant’s processing and/or packaging configuration is somewhat unique,
Can Lines’ top-notch installation team often found itself re-inventing the wheel with every
plant installation. Assembling, installing and hard-wiring of smaller projects could take
days and larger projects could take several weeks because of the difficulty of working
around obstacles in routing the conduit and electrical wiring required to power the
systems from the main power source.
Case Study
Can Lines Engineering

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In exploring marketplace offerings, the company discovered that a number of solutions
were available to achieve sensor and device connectivity and communications.
However, there were not many modular, pre-wiring solutions for cabling machinery
requiring 480 volt power. One of Can Lines’ local vendors recommended BradPower™
,
a relatively new modular power distribution system from Woodhead Industries. The
vendor explained that a major automotive OEM had recently installed the BradPower™
connection system in its automotive material assembly equipment.
“Once we heard that, we knew it had to be a robust, reliable product,” says Wedin. “In
high-volume automotive manufacturing, production downtime is just not an option
because of the tremendous cost involved in delaying or halting the assembly line.” He
adds that Can Lines was already a customer of Woodhead Industries and considered
Woodhead®
industrial electrical products and Brad®
connectivity products and
communications devices to be top of the line for quality and dependability.
Modular Machine Wiring Offers a Solution
The concept of modular wiring of machines and material handling systems began in
2002 with changes to the NFPA-79 Electrical Standard which governs the electrical
wiring used to power industrial equipment. These changes opened the door to the
development of a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to hard wiring for power
distribution to factory floor machinery systems. The new code allows the use of code-
compliant, factory applied connectors overmolded onto cables to provide up to 30A
feeder and 15A branch power distribution circuits up to 600V AC/DC.
Woodhead Industries is an industry leader in developing a modular, quick-connect motor
control and power distribution system for use on industrial machinery. The company’s
BradPower connection system consists of a series of code-compliant electrical
components – including trunk feeder and drop branch cordsets and connectors,
receptacles, tees and reducers, locking clips and a disconnect switch. The dual-rated
STOOW and TC/Open Wiring-rated quick-connect cordsets allow a trunk/feeder line be
installed in a daisy-chain configuration along the material handling system’s structure,
with convenient access points for power to be dropped to such field devices such as
motors, lights, and heaters.
The modular system is designed to provide machine builders, automation system
designers and integrators, and plant engineers with a standardized, reliable motor
control and power distribution infrastructure that is robust, scalable and easy-to-install
without the necessity for specialized tools and labor typically associated with traditional
conduit or raceway cabling installations. The use of modular systems in industrial
machine applications typically results in faster system assembly and commissioning,
significantly lower installation costs, and greater efficiency of routine maintenance and
repair operations. Pre-wired systems are also much easier to disassemble and
reconfigure should that be required at some future time.
Since their inception, quick-connect machine wiring systems have been used
successfully in a host of material handling system applications, including conveying,
sortation, automated storage and retrieval, parcel distribution, overhead transport,
packaging and shrink wrapping, and palletizing.

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Real-World Testing of BradPower
In 2003, Can Lines was charged with designing and installing a packaging system
designed to work in tandem with the customer’s paper towel converting line. The
customer just happened to be one of the world’s largest consumer goods suppliers.
Nonetheless, after seeing several demonstrations, the Can Lines team decided to
deploy BradPower’s soft-wiring technology in this complex, large-scale customer
installation.
The automated converting line began with massive two-ton rolls of tissue, which then go
through slitters and rewinders to eventually be narrowed down to individual rolls of paper
towels. This is where the Can Lines packaging system would kick in – packaging the
rolls and bundling them in multiples for conveying to the warehouse.
According to Wedin, traditional hard-wired installation of the packaging system would
have taken up to four weeks from the time the components arrived at the plant until the
system was assembled and ready to run. With the BradPower connection system, Can
Lines was able to develop the drawings, pick the components, soft-wire the chassis of
each part and code the parts onto a detailed installation plan. As a result, on-site
assembly and installation time was reduced by 75 percent.
Mission Accomplished
“BradPower passed the paper towel packing line installation test with flying colors. It was
like putting together all the pieces of a puzzle with a complete blueprint of where every
piece goes,” Wedin says. “At the plant, the electrical contractor only had to bring in the
main power source. To bring power from the source to the pre-wired machinery was
extremely easy – almost like hooking up garden hose – which allowed that portion of the
work to be performed very quickly by our regular installation team. In addition to
dramatically reducing installation time, I would estimate that we saved our customer tens
of thousands of dollars in electrical and operations costs.”
Wedin also credits Woodhead Industries for the technical support provided by the
company’s industrial automation and BradPower experts. “This help was invaluable to
us because the technology was new to us and, as with most projects, we were on an
extremely tight delivery and installation timeline. Woodhead assisted us in looking at the
entire system and guiding us on how to incorporate the BradPower components in the
most efficient and cost-effective way possible,” he notes.
As a result of the cost-saving and labor-reducing results experienced in this complex
installation, Can Lines Engineering has since established the BradPower quick-connect
modular power distribution system as the de facto standard for all of its new material
handling system design and engineering. “Since that initial project in 2003, we have
continued to implement BradPower in every large-scale project we have had. In fact,
BradPower’s modular soft-wiring technology has become a definite competitive
advantage for Can Lines – as well as for our customers,” Wedin concludes.