Why is it critical to inspect labels during printing?
Because not to can be very costly...
Thermal printing is an extensively used and mature technology that is extremely reliable. But that doesn’t prevent print issues occurring when printing labels. Manufacturers depend on thermal printing for product identification, dosage information, voltage currents, use by dates, batch information, model and serial numbers, to name a few. Literally billions of product identification labels are printed each year and the supply chain, downstream assembly processes and consumers are all dependent on the information printed.
But, no surprise perhaps, many print issues can and do happen when using thermal print technology.
In part 1 of this troubleshooting blog series, we look at common causes of the issues which mean errors, delays and costs to your business.
The printer
Without wanting to be the bearer of gloom, at the printer level there are a whole host of things that can and do go wrong:
Printheads can run hot
Platen rollers wear over time
Printhead pressure varies
Media substrate changes from batch to batch
Adhesion of the wax/resin can vary
Darkness and intensity or speed settings in label designs can be inadvertently changed
Wrong media is loaded
The media jams
The media ‘drifts’ out of alignment
Ribbons can and do break.
And that’s all before we consider the network level - networks go down, power outages occur jeopordising the integrity of data and causing duplicate labels, ‘lost’ labels and unnecessary or uncontrolled reprints.
The software
What about problems at the software level? Variable data can fall out of sync, incorrect data files and templates can be incorrectly selected by users, print jobs can be sent to the wrong printer, buffer files and data can be inadvertently deleted in a printer power down cycle.
And at the end of running a print job there is no visibility, without inspection, to know what has and hasn’t been printed.
So many pitfalls in printing labels in a production process.
A solution
But the good news is that there are ways to minimise – if not eliminate – these issues.
With the adoption of the right technology, manufacturers are put back in control of the print process to avoid defective or duplicate labels from being released into the supply chain.
In part 2, we look at some of the compliance requirements that might be the drivers for your business to take action and improve what goes on in your label print room…
About the author
Mark Worlidge is the CEO and Founder of Perceptor Inspection Technologies Ltd and the Global Product Lead for Perceptor IoT. He has over 25 years experience in selling and supporting 2D DataMatrix verification and complex machine vision solutions. With a wide range of experience in deploying OCR/OCV applications to pharma, medical device and life sciences manufacturing he is well versed in the challenges of reliable printing and inspection solutions.
