Our customer, an international medical devices company based in the West of Ireland, develops, manufactures, and markets healthcare products and services worldwide.
The Problem
Their manufacturing process was being hampered by a lack of automated label inspection which meant that products were being shipped out from time to time, with a label missing, no label applied or incorrect labelling. This was a long running problem, but, when a pallet of goods was returned from Asia at a huge expense to the company, the Packaging Engineer knew that an immediate solution needed to be found.
The AIS Solution
As a longstanding partner, they turned to the AIS engineering team for advice on a solution that would work for them. The AIS team advised installing 2 fixed barcode scanners (Datalogic Matrix 210) on each line that connected up to the AIS VB5 for in-line barcode validation and verification. The system can be customised to enable the operator to set-up the system to:
- Look for one or two labels, depending on the product line being labelled.
- Check if box has a barcode
The lines can then be stopped automatically if products are not labelled or mislabelled.
The Results
The system has now been in operation for a number of months with huge success and has been extended to 9 lines (half of the production lines) with a view to extending to all lines in the coming months. It has saved the company a huge amount of money as well as time and has made the production lines much more efficient overall as it guarantees correct labelling of product.
Contact us today to discuss this or similar solutions in more detail.