Packaging industries must operate with the highest standards of quality and productivity. Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a scoring system widely used to track production processes in packaging. An OEE score is calculated using data specifying quality (percent of good parts), performance (performance of nominal speed) and equipment availability (percent of planned uptime).
Quality issues can directly impact the customer, so it is essential to have processes in place to ensure the product is safe to use and appropriately labeled before it ships out. Additionally, defects to the packaging like dents, scratches and inadequate labeling can affect customer confidence in a product and their willingness to buy it at the store. Issues with quality can lead to unplanned downtime, waste and loss of productivity, affecting all three metrics of the OEE score.
Traditionally, visual inspections and packaging line audits have been used to monitor quality, however, this labor can be challenging in high volume applications. Sensing solutions can be used to partly automate the process, but complex demands, including multiple package formats and product formulas in the same line, require the flexibility that machine vision offers. Machine vision is also a vital component in adding traceability down to the unit in case a quality defect or product recall does occur.
Vision systems can increase productivity in a packaging line by reducing the amount of planned and unplanned downtime for manual quality inspection. Vision can be reliably used to detect quality defects as soon as they happen. With this information, a company can make educated improvements to the equipment to improve repeatability and OEE and ensure that no defective product reaches the customers’ hands.
Some vision applications for quality assurance in packaging include:
- Label inspection (presence, integrity, print quality, OCV/OCR)
- Check that a label is in place, lined up correctly and free of scratches and tears. Ensure that any printed graphics, codes and text are legible and printed with the expected quality. Use a combination of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to read a lot number, expiration date or product information, and then OCV (Optical Character Verification) to ensure legibility.
- Primary and secondary packaging inspection for dents and damage
Inspect bottles, cans and boxes to make sure that their geometry has not been altered during the manufacturing process. For example, check that a bottle rim is circular and has not been crushed so that the bottle cap can be put on after filling with product. - Safety seal/cap presence and position verification
Verifying that a cap and/or seal has been placed correctly on a bottle, and/or that the container being used is the correct one for the formula / product being manufactured. - Product position verification in packages with multiple items
In packages of solids, making sure they have been filled adequately and in the correct sequence. In pharmaceutical industries, this can be used to check that blister packs have a pill in each space, and in food industries to ensure that the correct food item is placed in each space of the package. - Certification of proper liquid level in containers
For applications in which it can’t be done reliably with traditional sensing technologies, vision systems can be used to ensure that a bottle has been filled to its nominal volume.
The flexibility of vision systems allows for addressing these complex applications and many more with a well-designed vision solution.
For more information on Balluff vision solutions and applications, visit www.balluff.com.
