insignia national sales and product manager, Boyd Rose, speaks to Food & Beverage Industry News about the company’s plans for AUSPACK 2022 and two featured product ranges from Domino that attendees can discover at the event.
AUSPACK 2022, held on 17-20 May at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, welcomed exhibitors from across Australia to showcase their product innovations. One such exhibitor is identification and traceability solutions provider, insignia.
As an Australian owned and operated business, insignia supports more than 5,000 customers nationwide across all industries to improve their operational efficiency. Solutions include labelling, barcoding and marking, warehouse mobility, inventory and supply chain, and traceability.
Exhibiting at AUSPACK since the mid-1990s, insignia’s focus at the last event was centred on the benefits of cloud monitoring for equipment, and remote monitoring of data collected by the machinery. This year, the broader theme for many exhibitors will be how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Australian manufacturing, addressing labour shortages and the closure of international borders.
This year, insignia’s focus is to present our customers with integrated labelling, coding and data capture solutions for the processing, packaging and manufacturing sectors. Changes in regulation and governance, traceability and sustainability demands, combined with digitisation, integration and technological advances are transforming how Australian manufacturer’s implement operational improvements. insignia provides manufacturers with the operational insight to be agile and responsive to industry changes and pursue manufacturing operations transformation (MOT) that maximises visibility of production lines and physical throughput.
“There’s a strong focus on remote machinery support, but also automating manual applications because there’s simply not the people there to manage the labelling or coding requirements,” said insignia national sales and product manager Boyd Rose.
“Our focus is embedding automation in coding and labelling processes in production lines to remove the requirement for human intervention. This covers a number of areas of automation areas including data entry, automated quality control and of course, remote monitoring and support of equipment.”
According to Rose, there’s an increased focus on remaining agile and responsive to rapid industry changes and regulatory requirements, as well as traceability.
“Traceability is essential in an expanding into the global market and there’s increasing industry focus on ‘batch traceability,’ or ‘batch-of-one’, which is takes traceability down to the individual item,” he said. “And that’s important for when products are sent overseas and on the odd occasion where customers get a recall, they don’t have to recall everything back in the batch. They can recall small batches and narrow it down to the individual item.”
In terms of the products on display at AUSPACK 2022, insignia will shine a spotlight on their partner, Domino. Attendees will be able to investigate two product ranges from Domino – the Ax-Series Plus and new R-Series range, among other coding and labelling technologies.
Domino R-Series
The Domino R-Series is a range of inline vision systems that will be launched at the AUSPACK event, off the back of the brand’s existing coding and labelling technologies. It offers validation of the correct printing of code and the quality check for the legibility and readability of that code.
“The R-series is essentially a range of inline vision systems that are designed to check the text codes, machine readable barcodes and label data to ensure that the code is of high quality and correctly correlates to a master data source,” Rose said.
The range expands Domino’s ability to automate the quality control of the printer in real time – a true quality check for each product within the manufacturing line.
There are also different levels of speed in which the R-Series can operate, depending on production requirements:
- Code presence – the basic level of vision, which can operate at a high speed for as many as 2,000 products per minute;
- Character count – whereby the number of characters is checked within a code; and
- Optical character recognition – the code is manually read and then checked against the master data source.
Although vision systems have been on the market in Australia for a while, they are often expensive and difficult to integrate. However, the R-Series range from Domino is a high-end vision system without the hefty price tag and can be seamlessly integrated with any Domino coder off the shelf
“It gives some flexibility in tying into customer ERP manufacturing systems as well,” Rose said. “It’s pretty exciting from a Domino supply perspective, because it gives us that extra piece of the puzzle when we’re looking at coding and the integration within an entire manufacturing line.”
Domino Ax-Series Plus
The Domino Ax-Series Plus range of continuous ink jet printers, launched in the Australian market at the last AUSPACK event, are designed to code variable information such as date and batch codes for food and beverage manufacturing.
A central feature of the Ax-Series is it’s robustness and suitability for harsh environments including the dairy industry, which has a lot of caustic washable areas, and in organic mulch applications produced in a packing shed, often operating at a high temperature. CIJ printers are well suited to high-speed applications at such as canning and bottling lines where approximately 1,500 products are produced per minute within a washdown environment.
Since its launch, the Domino Ax-Series has proved to be a highly robust product that has displayed great dependability over the last few challenging years, according to Rose.
“The reliability is fantastic, especially when we haven’t been able to get out and repair machines as easily with all the restrictions on technicians visiting site due to the pandemic,” he said. “It highlights the importance of remote monitoring – because we haven’t been able to send our technicians to sites, the Domino cloud interface has become critical to monitor manufacturing production lines.”
Easy to use, robust and minimal training required, Domino have mitigated production interrruptions for the Ax-Series with continuity of parts and consumable supply throughout the pandemic..
“Domino has been one step ahead of the curve in the event of not being able to get supplies through to Australia,” Rose said. “We have seen massive shortages in raw materials, and Domino has mitigated potential delays in supply of spare parts and consumables, which are the fluids and inks used in those machines. That’s really helped us with this range of products over the last couple of years to provide exceptional reliability and uptime for our customers.”
Best in class
As a global brand with eight technologies that are standouts across the board, Rose said that Domino invests heavily in research and development and considers what their customers really need when developing products.
“Domino is a world-renowned brand and insignia is the sole Australian distributor within Australia,” Rose said. “We complement their technologies with an Australia-wide service and support team. The technologies which are built to be future-proof – and with capabilities like the R-series vision system you can potentially integrate into older legacy installations.”
To find out more about Domino’s products and how you can automate your coding and labelling processes, visit www.insignia.com.au/brands/domino.