Smart Manufacturing for Food & Beverage Packaging Lines

Traditional smart-manufacturing solutions in the food & beverage industry focus on Overall Equipment Effectiveness reporting and traceability tools, both of which have valuable applications. In this presentation, SICK Inc. and AutoCoding Systems will cover this functionality, and also address specific solutions to common challenges that food and beverage manufacturers face on packaging lines and solve by creating work-arounds, building custom solutions or utilizing extensive manual labor.

One of the challenges that many manufacturers face is determining print quality of best by/lot codes, which in the past have been accomplished with complex OCR vision technology.  Attendees will learn about a new candidate character technology focused on measuring print quality instead of a machine vision system reading characters. This technology greatly reduces the engineering time to set up the system, in addition to lowering the total cost of ownership.

Another common challenge is the setup and coding of all packaging lines devices, like printers (Domino, Markem Imaje, Video Jet and others), checkweighers, metal detectors, x-ray machines, PLCs and other packaging line equipment. Attendees will learn how setup and coding can be accomplished with one touch from an HMI or smart phone screen, saving significant production time while simultaneously eliminating costly data entry, coding, and setup errors.

Attendees will also learn how to error-proof a packaging line to prevent recalls and potential food safety issues. We will discuss how utilizing vision and barcode technologies can provide 100% inspection to determine if the packaging is correct without the extensive use of labor to periodically check for compliance.

Speakers

Steve Winski, Software Solutions Sales Manager, SICK, Inc.

Steve Winski has 35 years of experience in factory automation and MES/Smart Manufacturing software solutions and has worked for Pepsi, Rockwell Software, General Electric, Honeywell and several smaller software companies.

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Barrie Fallon, VP US Operations, AutoCoding Systems

Barrie Fallon is the VP of Operations at AutoCoding Systems in the United States. Working with AutoCoding for over 10 years in a variety of roles initially at the UK headquarters, Barrie relocated to the US three years ago to help accelerate the US Business. With a background in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science he has over 15 years experience delivering enterprise software and control systems across the Food and Beverage, Aerospace and Medical sectors.

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