5 Signs It’s Time to Upgrade Your Conveyor System

Amid the day-to-day pressures of production, it’s easy to take your conveyor system for granted, to let it “just keep running.” But when your system starts to slow things down instead of driving them forward, the impact goes far beyond maintenance costs. Every minute of inefficiency translates into lost productivity, reduced capacity, and missed opportunity.

At Nercon, we understand that your conveyor system is the heartbeat of your operation. That’s why our mission is to design and manufacture systems that deliver the speed, reliability, and efficiency you need to stay competitive. When your line starts showing these symptoms, it’s time to think upgrade or replacement:

#1. Maintenance and Repair Costs Are Climbing

If you’re spending increasing hours and budget just to keep your line running, that’s a strong signal. Aging conveyor systems may struggle with increasing failures and more unplanned downtime. Tracking metrics like unplanned downtime minutes, maintenance hours, and parts spend can give you visibility into a trend in rising costs. 

#2. Production Throughput Can’t Keep Up With Goals

When production goals outgrow the system’s capacity, bottlenecks can form and hold back growth. Ask this: Are you running at full line capacity? Are bottlenecks forming downstream? Are changeovers inefficient? If yes, then your system may no longer align with your operating goals.

#3. Safety, Sanitation or Compliance Standards Have Changed

In most consumer packaged goods industries, standards and regulatory expectations continue to evolve. If your production environment demands more frequent wash-downs, stricter cleaning cycles, or higher hygiene risk, an upgrade to a modern sanitary conveyor system can reduce risk and support uptime.

#4. Product Mix or Packaging Has Changed

If your facility recently added new SKUs, packaging formats or line speeds, the existing conveyor may struggle with flexibility, orientation, or layout changes.
Operations leaders should ask: Does the conveyor accommodate your current and projected product mix? Are changeovers quick and reliable? Can the layout adapt when market demands shift? If not, it’s time to evaluate a more flexible, future-ready system.

#5. Automation Integration and Data Visibility Are Lacking

Today’s manufacturing operations increasingly rely on interconnected systems, IoT, line monitoring, and integration between material handling and automation. When your conveyor system is isolated or lacking the controls or data interface you’ve come to need, that’s a red flag. 

An Upgrade Doesn’t Always Mean a

Tear-Down

A complete conveyor replacement isn’t always necessary to get performance back on track. With the right expertise, even a few strategic upgrades—like new components, replacement parts, or adjustments to system design—can deliver noticeable gains in efficiency and reliability. 

Nercon’s team understands how to evaluate your system holistically, identifying opportunities to fine-tune performance, extend equipment life, and reduce downtime. Whether it’s modernizing controls, improving product transfers, or adding new equipment or parts for flexibility, incremental improvements can often achieve the results you need without the cost and disruption of a full rebuild.

As part of our collaborative approach, we work with customers to assess their lines and identify opportunities for improvement. These are some of the proactive steps we recommend during that process: 

• Perform a gap-analysis. Compare current performance as indicated through metrics like downtime, maintenance cost and throughput, to business targets for the next three to five years.
• Develop the business case. Quantify the cost of status quo and compare it to the cost and ROI of a new conveyor system. We can help pull this information together.
• Schedule your upgrade proactively: Waiting for failure is expensive. If you upgrade when performance gaps start emerging, you maintain control, planned downtime and budget predictability.

Your production line depends on your conveyor system more than you might realize. If you’d like to explore whether your conveyor system is holding you back, we’d be glad to help analyze your line, identify gaps and map out a modernization path that aligns with your operations goals. 

Contact us today! Let’s talk about where your conveyor system could perform better.