Quality Control

Procter & Gamble's Blois production unit manu-factures shampoo bottles for the Pantene and Head and Shoulders brands, among others. With bottles for roughly 1,500 unique product references produced there, the Blois facility is one of the leading manufacturers of its kind for all of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The facility produces 1.2 million products per day on multiple high-speed production lines running at throughputs ranging from 300 to 500 products per minute.

As production line speeds continue to rise, manual inspection has given way to automated inspection using machine vision that can spot defects more quickly and accurately. With a strong commitment to producing high-quality product, the facility first invested in machine vision a few years ago for inspection applications to check label presence, type and position, and lot code.

Expansion Plans

After realizing significant benefits in terms of increased efficiency and consistent product quality, the Blois plant decided to expand its machine vision implementations throughout the production unit. At first, the facility implemented machine vision only on its fastest labeling and marking production lines. These applications used high-performance Cognex PC-based machine vision systems utilizing 8100 Series frame grabbers. More recently the unit began implementing machine vision on its lower speed lines as well. For these applications, though, Procter & Gamble chose In-Sight vision sensors from Cognex, instead of PC-based systems because of lower price points and easier implementation. The company recently installed In-Sight 1000 and In-Sight 3000 vision sensors on its Blois unit marking and packaging production lines.

Marking and Labeling

The first application is used to inspect the marking and labeling of shampoo bottles. In-Sight sensors along the marking line verify product marking items: the type of labels and their correct positioning on each bottle, one on the back and one on the front. The vision sensors also verify the presence of lot numbers. The second application is to verify compliance with packaging specifications on the packaging production line where the shampoo bottles are shrink wrapped in six packs. Integrated, independent and easy-to-use systems, In-Sight vision sensors contributed to speeding up the implementation of machine vision at Procter & Gamble, because, they meet the inspection and speed requirements while offering a price tag that makes the investment more easily cost-justifiable.

Results of A Robust Interface

The integrated Ethernet interface, along with the connection of the In-Sight Sensors to the network, became significant assets for production. In-Sight sensors installed on the two marking and packaging production lines are linked to an Ethernet network and communicate directly with the production unit's monitoring system. Due to the architecture, the results from the machine vision inspections, such as the number of defects detected and rejects, are centralized and viewable on the monitoring system. At the end of each production cycle, they are recorded in the production report. Production managers then use these data to guarantee production quality. They may also use these data to perform qualitative analysis and generate statistics to optimize manu-facturing and production processes. The introduction of In-Sight sensors at the Blois production unit has maintained high productivity at Procter & Gamble while ensuring optimum quality of production.