How to achieve compliance & avoid chargebacks

Now it gets serious

In part 1 of this troubleshooting blog series, we looked at common causes of the issues which mean errors, delays and costs to your business.

This time, we consider implications of the contractual and compliance requirements your business works within and what the drivers - and solutions - are for ensuring incorrect or defective labels aren't released.

Contracts and regulations

The methods you use to inspect labels during printing may have a far wider reaching impact than just accuracy and efficiency. Consider - and we know, of course, that you have - your contractual supply agreements and regulatory compliance requirements; one incorrectly or defective label can lead to total delivery rejects and chargebacks and, at worse, can lead to foreclosure by regulatory authorities for repeated non-compliance.

Anyone working in compliant industries will be fully aware that compliance requirements can be demanding and onerous. To fully meet compliance requirements - such as those mandated by the Food & Drugs Administration - demands process control, strict batch reconciliation, user access control and an audit trail history. It also requires that accurate and correct data is printed and recorded without duplicates along with the correct territory information.

So how to address these requirements without creating a whole load of manual tasks for an already busy workforce?

Real-time inspection

And it really is only through real-time inspection that all of these complex issues can be captured. But the good news is that enabling real-time inspection in your manufacturing process is not as arduous or complex as you think it is.

Innovative solutions such as Perceptor IoT bring real-time inspection of labels - with the ability to automatically overstrike and destroy non-compliant, duplicate or poorly printed defective labels - without human intervention. Working at print speeds of up to 6” (150mm)/second, Perceptor IoT also holds the printing process to prevent unauthorised labels from being printed. When running, it check printed labels in real-time for:

• barcode verification

• data and human readable content

• print blemishes

• patterns and symbols

• duplicate labels

• ISO data content validation to UDI and GS1 for the Medical Device, Pharma, Life Sciences

• IUID for the US Defence industry

Next time, why inspecting labels does not just ensure print quality and data compliance but also drives down production and labour costs, reduces material wastage and increases throughput. And with the right technology in place, label inspection removes the need for timely and costly manual processes.

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.