Quality assurance is essential for food manufacturers, protecting brand reputation, sales, and profits by preventing recalls, fines, and defective products from reaching consumers.

Yet QA is often seen purely as a cost-necessary to reduce risk, but still a cost. While that cost can sometimes be optimized, it rarely contributes directly to improved production performance or profitability.

But what if quality assurance could do more? What if it could also optimize production and deliver measurable ROI?

At TriVision, we use advanced machine vision technology to turn quality assurance into a profitable investment. By creating value beyond defect detection, TriVision systems function not only as reliable quality control tools for Quality Managers, but also as powerful production optimization tools for Operators and Production Managers.

Efficient, reliable vision inspection

Some of the most obvious costs that our automated inspection reduces are manual labour costs. Based on leading vision technology build on highly advanced algorithms, TriVision systems can reliably perform accurate quality control of all products in high speed productions and hereby release manual labour resources from tasks that increasingly challenge the human eye.

The accurate failure detection eliminates all falsely rejected products. With the ability to set up and accurately follow thresholds for all error types, TriVision systems will only detect and reject products with variations that actually are defined as defective products. As a result, unnecessary food loss, waste and costs will be avoided.

As our automated vision-based quality control can inspect products at high speed, multiple packages per second, operators can maximize the speed of their conveyor belt and overall production to increase throughput and hence OEE while still ensuring complete quality assurance.

A user-friendly system for operators to minimize costs

We have made sure that operators on the shop floor easily can utilize all the valuable data that TriVision systems generate when inspecting each product. The system brings a clear overview of production performance and error distribution with real-time data and sets off immediate alarms if an unacceptable number of defective products appear.

Preventive alarms can also be set up to spot and predict specific tendencies in the production, e.g. if label placement worsens. Based on inspection data and advanced mathematical models, the system can spot and predict if a tendency of e.g. slightly tilted label placements, but still acceptable placements, will worsen and result in unacceptable label placements. If an issue is predicted, the system can preventively alert the operator. This enables the operator to take preventive actions in terms of making adjustments or planning maintenance, before the tendency turns into unacceptable errors that cause food loss, waste, and unplanned stops.

Hence, the preventive alarms improves OEE significantly by reducing food loss, waste and converting unplanned stops into planned maintenance.

The purpose of quality assurance within the food industry is first and foremost to ensure the quality of products that leave the factory to reach supermarket shelves. Whereas quality assurance based on manual labour minimizes the risk of sending out defective food products and packaging, a TriVision system eliminates that risk with reliable inspection of all products and full product quality documentation. A risk that is worth eliminating, as errors in package seals, labels, date markings or appearance can cause bad customer experiences, sales decline, recalls, fines from retailers and in worst case food safety hazards.

Even if manufacturers would choose to reduce conveyor belt speed and decrease productivity to allow manual labour inspection of all products, humans are expected to make mistakes at some point. The number of defective products that will slip through annually and its consequences will vary for each manufacturer.

However, our experiences show us that a TriVision solution is a good business case for most manufacturers using manual labour inspection based solely on how our solution can eliminate the annual average costs of recalls and fines.

Additionally, manufacturers can utilize the generated inspection data further to perform production optimization. Data is generated from all inspections and is converted into elaborate production statistics in TriVision’s cloud-based Production Intelligence data base. As the production statistics are based on accurate vision data, Production Managers can get true, valuable insights into statistics on the overall OEE, uptime, rejected products, error type distribution and cavity error distribution. It allows them to potentially spot trends across various process parameters such as material suppliers or work shifts.

Based on the historic inspection data, our intelligent algorithms and mathematical models, TriVision’s Production Intelligence solutions automatically generate tangible recommendations based on these inspection data, which support managers in spotting the production trends that are profitable to change. Hence, with a TriVision system, site management can always count on having concrete suggestions for optimizing their production.