Enhancing Aesthetic Quality Assurance in Automated Bottling Lines: A 360° Inspection Approach to Mitigate Packaging Defects
About the Customer:
Headquartered in Switzerland, our client is a global, science-based agtech company which boasts a workforce of 30,000 employees spread across over 90 countries. Specializing in providing cutting-edge seeds and crop protection innovations, the company is dedicated to enhancing the prosperity of farmers worldwide. Through their transformative work, they are revolutionizing agricultural practices by influencing how crops are grown and protected, solidifying their position as a key player in the agrochemical and agtech sectors.
Problem Statement:
The increasing demand for efficiency in automated bottling lines has posed a significant challenge in ensuring the visual quality of bottles, caps, and labels. With the absence of direct visual inspection due to the seamless flow of bottles from filling to packaging on automated lines, the risk of undetected packaging defects reaching the market has become a pressing concern for our client. The lack of a comprehensive inspection mechanism exposes the brand to potential reputation damage.
The client sought a solution for visual inspection that would ensure aesthetic quality without compromising the speed of the bottling line.
Jekson Solution:
Jekson Vision, leveraging its extensive experience in Vision Inspection 360° Aggregation, introduced an innovative 360° Inspection System for Bottling lines. This system incorporates five cameras strategically placed around the bottle – four on the sides and one on the top, enabling comprehensive inspection from all angles to capture the minutest details.
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This comprehensive view allows for the detection of the slightest defects in the bottles, ensuring that no imperfections go unnoticed.
Rejection Criteria of Imperfect Packaging on the Bottles:
The client established specific rejection criteria that the camera system would detect to ensure the quality of packaged bottles. Our 360° Inspection System was designed to ensure that all these defects in packaged bottles would be captured and reject those who would have the following issues:
Cap Issues:
Cap not fully screwed: The system examines each bottle to verify if the cap is securely screwed. Bottles with incomplete cap fastening are flagged as defective and prevented from progressing to the packaging stage.
Cap Tamper Evidence (TE) ring issues: Detection of folded, crooked, or TE rings on the cap, thereby ensuring packaging integrity
Cap without TE ring: Identification of missing TE rings, which could lead to spillage, a defect that was challenging to detect on automated lines through manual inspection.
Cap not screwed/slanted: Recognition of misaligned caps and TE rings that may cause leakage issues.
Cap TE ring broken: Detection of broken TE rings, indicating a potential compromise of the product.
Cap wrong colour or size: Identification of caps with incorrect colour or size misalignments from the batch.
Label issues:
Pasting of Wrinkled label during application.
Misaligned labels preventing skewed labels from reaching the market.
Missing label
Wrong label
Absence or incomplete/clear batch coding on the label.
Label close to the transparent line (inside the liquid volume indicator).
Bottle without transparent line: Recognition of bottles lacking the transparent line altogether.
Jekson's innovative 360° Inspection System addresses these rejection criteria, ensuring a thorough visual inspection of the packaged bottles, preventing defective products from entering the market, and upholding the aesthetic quality standards set by the client.
What Did Jekson Do:
This unique challenge of aesthetic inspection, there is no player in the market at present with a comprehensive solution. While other players do offer botte inspection solutions, none sufficiently addresses the minute inspection criteria required by the client. Jekson seized this opportunity to combine its expertise in inspection technology with the capabilities of its 360° machine, resulting in the creation of the innovative 360° Bottle Inspection Machine.
Approach and Teams Involved
Jekson undertook a thorough due diligence process and approached the project from two key perspectives: Machine Design and Inspection Software. These two perspectives together paved the way for the 360° Bottle Inspection Machine.
A collaborative effort involved multiple teams, including Sales, Machine Design, Solutions Desk, Image Processing, and Service. Challenges such as line integration, installation issues, and bottlenecks were met with teamwork, brainstorming, and direct collaboration with the customer. The team at Jekson was very enthusiastic to work towards a solution that was not readily available in the market, and the first mover advantage worked as a carrot to motivate the team to ensure the success of the project. The overall time taken from planning to execution took 1 year.
Results- Quantitative & qualitative
Line Speed confirmation up to 150 PPM, depending on the bottle size.
Minimum Inspection Accuracy during the process will meet 99.5% or above.
False rejection due to inspection less than 0.5% of the production volumes.
Inspection reliability 99.9% - rejection can only be due to over inspection for any parameter.
Warranty 18 months from the date of dispatch or date of installation, whichever is later.
(Detailed document attached)
The real-time data /record of good & rejected bottles for a day/week/month/year can be
retrieved from the available back up data which can be taken by Syngenta after the
completion of the batch,
Machine has a feature to take backup for images; once the batch is completed, the system clears all images for the previous batch unless you take the necessary backup within your backup storage.
The machine has an SSD with 500 GB of storage space
Conclusion
The industry highly appreciates the solution given by Jekson, with 99.5% or above accuracy, the customer does not have any defective product going to the market.
This machine is not just limited to the inspection of bottles for the agrochemical industry but can also be used in other industries such as Pharma, Beverages, and any other industry that would require inspection of Bottles, Vials, and Ampules.
