Project
A national food products manufacturer located in Michigan had issues with their scales and printing program. The company was a long-time customer of Grand Rapids Metrology and was well aware of our extensive scope of metrology capabilities, including weighing solutions.
The system used prior selected a product to be weighed and then printed a label that was placed on a corresponding storage tote. The current label did not contain enough data to meet the customer’s needs. They contacted GRM to edit their existing system so it could include more relevant and timely information on the printed label.
Initial Needs & Challenges
In order to comply with specific food-industry regulations, the food product company needed to add Date of Manufacture and Lot Number. A Lot Number identifies the product’s expiration date, scale and shift.
An initial challenge was to determine how the current program was operating and what needed to be modified to accomplish the customer’s project. To do this, our engineer’s downloaded the existing program from the scale units. After the download, the team noticed several modifications had previously been made to the program which presented challenges when it came time to edit the program’s operation.
Solution
After addressing the needs and challenges of our customer, Grand Rapids Metrology developed a solution focused on rewriting a portion of the existing program to clean up the previous modification. During the rewrite, our team added the Date of Manufacture and Lot Number to meet the customer requirements of the revised labels. The Days until Expiration information was not printed but stored as data within the system. From that, the Expiration Date was automatically calculated.
Here is the label crafted by GRM and used everyday by the customer:
The data produced from GRM’s label is very specific and time-bound. Before this solution, the customer printed a label with much less information, as seen here:
Results
After Grand Rapids Metrology’s weighing solution was implemented, the program rewrite and label modification gave the customer traceability on labels regarding the Date of Manufacture, Expiration Date, Line Number and Shift.
Aside from fulfilling the customer’s requirement, the rewrite meet labeling standards set forth by food industry regulations. The new program also eliminated human error in the calculation of the expiration date and alleviated the tedious work of the manual calculation. The customer was so pleased with the results they asked GRM to implement the program for two additional scales at their facility.
Making operations quicker, more efficient and more accurate is what we do! To start a solution project of your own, contact us and we’ll help make your life a little easier.
