Founded in 1958, DA Hall & Co is a privately owned agribusiness that operates one of the largest poultry and egg farms in Australia. From humble beginnings it has grown to become a large and successful integrated rural enterprise. DA Hall & Co has more than 200 employees, fulfilling a seven day-a-week operation.
As a partner for over 15 years, they turned to insignia to help improve productivity through automated coding and labelling solutions for fully compliant primary coding, inner and outer carton coding, carton and pallet labelling.
The customer’s challenge
To meet an upturn in throughput from their expansion, DA Hall turned to insignia to design automated coding and labelling solutions which eliminated labor-intensive operations.
Egg production and processing is a heavily regulated industry with producers and processors required to meet strict traceability and food safety standards. Standardised egg coding is critical with regulations, changes in consumer preferences, food safety concerns, and retailer demands all factors suppliers need to integrate as part of the manufacturing process. In Australia, it is mandatory for producers and suppliers to provide data about the product history, farm location, use-by-dates, batch and date information. Product transparency ensures full visibility on every information related to the product including provenance and other key attributes. DA Hall & Co required a robust solution that would meet future growth.
To meet retail standards, all coding and labelling solutions must provide a unique traceable code demonstrating provenance and allow batch traceability back to the farm and flocks. DA Hall & Co faced a challenge in ensuring reliable date codes were printed on the retail carton with existing manually inputted processes reducing efficiency and allowing room for error in labelling and coding.
SSCC pallet labelling is one of the leading causes of non-compliance and pallet rejection by retailers. To ensure their product reached major retailers seamlessly, DA Hall & Co required an automated pallet labelling solution that would reduce the potential for manual mislabelling.
“We’re a 365-day operation, and to date, insignia’s never let us down… for us it’s a no-brainer to bring insignia on board with us,” DA Hall & Co general manager, Supply Chain Don Trefz said.
Our approach and what we delivered
Keeping production lines fully operational is critical to our partners success. The insignia team evaluated DA Hall & Co’s operations to identify critical areas that would benefit from streamlining and automating processes.
Eggshell Coding
Crisp printing and legibility are crucial to achieving permanent traceability in egg coding, especially for multi-line printing. To ensure quality of the printed codes, fast dry and non-diffusion ink features are required.
Domino A520i Continuous Inkjet (CIJ) printers provide food grade, highly legible crisp coding with high contrast and low bleed. They also produce smaller, high colour contrast drops for placing code directly onto eggshells with code integrity maintained even if condensation forms on eggs when they are transported from cool into warm and humid environments. Print information is adjusted via integrated systems with the grader to allow fixed and variable data such as date/time/shift/expiration information changes while production is in progress.
Inner Pack Carton Coding
To maintain speed and reliability with the existing and newly installed Moba graders, the insignia team designed and built a tailor-made traversing system for the fleet of Domino Gx Series Thermal Inkjet (TIJ) printers. This customised component allowed the printers to be mounted directly onto packing lane conveyors allowing for seamless integration and perfect alignment of print with the egg cartons.
TIJ printers offer the flexibility to print high resolution codes on paper, plastic or moulded pulp egg boxes and provide high-volume, high-speed printing in demanding environments. To achieve high-resolution date and batch traceability coding onto egg cartons, Domino Gx Series printers were integrated into the existing and new production lines with print information changed via the Moba grader updating date/time/expiration information automatically.
Outer Carton Labelling
To improve line efficiency, Domino’s Gx Series TIJ printer apply variable date and batch coding for outer cartons. Due to insignia’s scanner array input and integrated software, unique date and batch code barcode labels can be applied automatically irrespective of the brand and batch moving through the production line.
Domino M Series Print & Apply labellers provide Trade Unit Number (TUN) labelling and coding to GS1 Standards. Automation of labelling also resulted in greater efficiencies by reducing storage space required for individual cartons and cost saving by eliminating multiple carton print designs.
SSCC Pallet Labelling
To achieve complete automation, Domino M Series swing arm labellers were installed at the end of the production line to apply Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC) pallet labels directly onto wrapped pallets. SSCC labels are applied using a swing arm which applies the compliant GS1 standard labels to logistics units carrying the Best Before date, Batch Number and consumer unit (GTIN) for effortless supply chain traceability.
“It’s been a much cleaner, much simpler system, less training involved and a lot more reliability and uptime,” Trefz said.
The impact on the customer’s business
A major factor for choosing insignia was the strong reliable partnership which has been built over 15 years. DA Hall chose insignia because of our dedication to solution delivery, our commitment to developing a robust solution designed to meet future growth opportunities, and the capability to develop tailored solutions for extended uninterrupted runs and increased uptime.
Solutions provided also protect multiple brands identities by demonstrating provenance and authenticity of product, allowing effortless product traceability through the supply chain in the event of a product recall.
Economically, DA Hall’s investment in reliable technology and service capability has future-proofed production with increased reliability, line efficiency and scalable solutions that have capability to increase as production volumes increase.
With insignia’s customised solutions and installation of Domino coding and labelling equipment, insignia helped DA Hall achieve 100 percent paddock to consumer traceability, reduce operating costs, increase scalability, and improve productivity and efficiency.
“Without the reliability that insignia provides, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do,” Trefz said.
For further information
To find out more on how an insignia solution can meet your unique needs, call us on 1300 467 446 or email us at sales@insignia.com.au.