Company increases inspection line speed by 10%.

Objective
Tag and label printers must be able to detect defects on printing materials for rejection or replacement. Recently, one of the largest North American label printers came to Matthews to find a new way to identify defects on their film-based labels. Their existing process involved manual label inspection, but often the defect was too small to be detected by the Quality Assurance department. Those undetected errors resulted in numerous customer complaints and costly rejected product.

Matthews’ Solution
Matthews recommended a large printed mark be placed at the site of the defect, allowing the person who was manually inspecting the labels to identify it quickly, remove the bad label or replace the bad label. Matthews installed eight VIAjet™ L-Series high resolution thermal ink jet print heads, along with their universal print controller, MPERIA®. MPERIA® was easily integrated into the customer’s existing vision system, resulting in real-time, accurate error notifications. Error notifications were then sent to the print heads to mark the defected product.

Results
Before the installation of Matthews’ equipment on the label application, visual inspection was slow and inconsistent, eye strain was a major issue and defects were often missed completely, resulting in costly product returns. After Matthews integrated MPERIA® along with their printing system, inspection speed increased by 10%, eye strain was reduced, customer satisfaction improved drastically and product returns diminished saving the label printer thousands of dollars.