Marco system gives Cucina Sano 100% label validation
Tags: Marco / Marco Trac-IT
As part of their ongoing pro-active working partnership with Bakkavör Cucina Sano, factory floor profitability experts Marco have further enhanced the company’s production efficiency and security with the installation of their Trac-IT Line Control Module at their plant in Lincolnshire. The Marco system is a blend of software and dedicated hardware that provides comprehensive packaging line control and traceability across six meal collation lines, removing the possibility of wrongly or inaccurately labelled product leaving the plant.
The Cucina Sano facility produces high quality, hand-crafted salads, deli products and ready meals. The tempting, mouth-watering array of products provided for Marks & Spencer includes their ‘Food to Go’, ‘Med Deli’, ‘Prepared Salad’ and ‘Vegetable’ ranges, which bring new levels of sophistication and consumer enjoyment to the ready meal concept.
Marco system gives Cucina Sano 100% label validation
From the time a specific meal order requirement is initiated, all the Cucina Sano factory operations, including the ingredient assembly, recipe build-up, packaging and despatch processes, are driven and controlled by the Marco Trac-IT system. Initially commissioned in 2007, the system has been steadily evolving and fine tuned over the past two years via a dynamic joint development process between Marco engineers and the Cucina Sano team.
The ‘going live’ of the latest Marco Trac-IT Line Control Module brings a new level of security and visibility to the packaging process as assembled products leave the High Care area on route to Collation. Brand protection is vital to companies such as Cucina Sano and therefore ensuring correct labelling and date coding is of paramount importance to remove any risk of EPWs and RTMs occurring. The Marco system provides a belt and braces ‘double-check’ approach, controlling all essential line equipment from a central data terminal.
The Marco Trac-It Line Control Module ensures that the works orders information entered for that day’s production is pushed down to the Marco data terminal operating the packing line in High Care. Once a particular job is started it will automatically become active in Collation. Not only does the system check the 2D barcodes on labelled products as they pass down the lines, but it also controls the printing of label rolls from preset information in the system technical files, prior to them being booked onto a particular line. The latter ensures, via strict in-built controls, that wrong product details and dates, such as Nov31st, cannot be printed on labels. In parallel, label roll data must agree with all relevant parameters, before they can be used. In the unlikely event of a wrongly labelled product being detected, the Marco system immediately sends a signal to stop the line and an error message appears on the system.
As Cucina Sano’s IT/IS manager Jon Purbrick concludes: “The Cucina Sano operation is highly complex and we need to deal with rapidly changing product requirements in different pack formats. The relationship with Marco has strengthened over the past two years and the added security now delivered by this latest innovation brings greater levels of confidence for Cucina Sano and in turn for our customer and their consumers. We are confident that wrongly labelled product cannot leave our plant and even ‘near misses’ will be a thing of the past”
GHTime Code(s): e9c92
