Autocoding

Natasha's Law

With the introduction of Natasha's Law, allergen control has become even more imperative. Many suppliers need to review and improve their labelling and inspection procedures in respect of allergen declarations. Food service manufacturers need to be especially careful in providing unpackaged goods (I.e. cakes etc.) that contain allergens.

Full Compliance

Despite several supermarket chains introducing codes of practice for label verification, batch rejections increased between 2014 & 2015 by more than 74%. Most of these were not due to label verification issues, which serves to illustrate that, important as label verification is, there are many other controls to be effectively managed in order to minimise the risk of batch rejections.

This is where our holistic systems approach really scores over other autocoding systems, as it not only helps supermarket suppliers to minimise their coding & labelling errors, but when included as part of the Harford integrated solution, at the same time, can improve production line efficiency and performance.

Accurate Date Coding

On hundreds of production lines, we help to ensure that printed date codes on products are always accurate, every single day.

Rather than relying on operators to manually configure any printer on a production line, Harford Autocoding sends real-time actionable information directly to the device. This eliminates the risk of human error and reduces changeover times, resulting in higher production efficiency.

Through the integration of other business systems, e.g. ERP, MRP, or product specification solutions, Harford always sends the correct information to any packaging line device.

Label Verification

At the start of each production run, Harford configures in-line barcode scanners to check that the correct packaging materials and labels are used - on each individual product, case or pallet. This way, we can ensure 100% verification of packs, at the earliest opportunity, to avoid unnecessary wastage.

Following the Right First Time approach, operators usually check materials issued to the line via the Harford terminal before the production run even commences.
Next to in-line scanners, we also supply vision inspection systems, if machine-readable identifiers cannot be added to the product packaging.

Reduce production costs

Due to our integrated approach, with any Harford Autocoding solution, you will already have the basic architecture for a fully fledged factory floor data capture / MES / MIS solution in place. It can easily be expanded to include production line efficiency & downtime analysis, quality assurance, materials management, and wastage reduction in a single system.

Now you don't only ensure that the increasingly broad requirements for autocoding compliance are completely met, you can also drive down unit production costs through focussing upon areas of wastage and lost opportunities, which matter most and which can have the greatest impact in the shortest possible time periods upon profitability.

Read more: Is Wastage Driving Inflation?

Read more: Here’s How Waste Impacts Your Bottom Line