Kalapi’s Nanjee assesses carton inspection systems

Nanjee went to Drupa 2012 with an intention to find a solution to a production bottleneck of manual carton sorting. There he shortlisted two out of four manufacturers of inspection system basis their knowledge and understanding of pharma requirements.

 

Nanjee said, “The other two were experts in cigarette cartons and had limited understanding of pharma. The machines made for cigarette cartons are very stringent in their check. They won’t let anything pass. With such a system, the rejection rates would be 30-40%, which is not practical.”

 

One of the two shortlisted companies was Vision Experts, which had tied up with Pratham. “When I got to know about Pratham’s collaboration with Vision Experts, I was behind Mr Deshpande for the machine. But the machine was yet to be readied,” said Nanjee adding, “Meanwhile, I saw a couple of more machines and did extensive trials, but was not happy with the results.”

 

Finally, when Deshpande along with experts from Germany visited Kalapi and answered all the queries of Nanjee, who by then had acquired a thorough knowledge of what to expect and what not to expect from such a system, Nanjee bit the bullet and placed an order for the machine.

 

“The expectation from the machine was that it should not detect the errors which I don’t want it to detect. When such software detects every minute variation, the rejection rates are 30-40% rejection which are not feasible.”

 

“The critical part was the length of the machine. When the machine detects an error and by the time the carton reaches the ejection it should get sufficient time to eject. If the distance is small it will not eject correctly. So after talking to many suppliers we came to a conclusion that there are two things that are important: stability of the machine and the distance between the inspection and the ejection,” added Nanjee.

 

When the machine finally came, though apprehensive at first, Kalapi team was happy with the initial results and later plugged it into the actual production after one month of trials. “We got about 12% rejection at that time and 88% cartons which were passed by the machine were actually error free,” said Nanjee.

 

According to Nanjee, the differentiating factor of Supersort as compared to its counterparts on the market is its illumination system. “Most of the machines deploy LED lights. Such systems see a lot more than required. For instance, it will identify the see-through of the board. Now you don’t want it to see that because see-through is an inherent defect of a recycled board.”

 

“Also, with LED, the crease lines need to be blinded. The LED illumination detects such errors and that’s why the rejection is as high as 30%. Again LED lights need to be kept in a cooling chamber for consistent results throughout the day. Only one manufacturer has incorporated cooling chamber in his machine.”

 

Nanjee claims that they run Supersort at 45-50,000 cartons per hour without any improper ejection.

 

Nanjee said, “These machines are not meant to reduce your wastage. They will just ensure that the material you send to your customers is the right one. You will have to work on your printing quality, get the colours correct to minimise the rejection. So now we are using CIP3 to get the colour right.” 

 

“In the next three months, we will streamline our colour variation to an extent that we eliminate all the rejections that happen because of colour variations,” concluded Nanjee.