Vision System Increases OEE By 200% On Pharmaceutical Packaging Line

A major pharmaceutical manufacturer’s packaging line presents a challenging vision system application because of the need to select exactly the right label among dozens of possible alternatives needed to meet differing languages and regulatory requirements around the world. The vision system used in the past rejected 25% of good packages.

When the pharmaceutical manufacturer installed a new packaging line, they upgraded the vision system to Cognex In-Sight® 5100 and 5600 vision systems, which use optical character recognition/optical character verification (OCR/OCV) to read characters on the label and compare them to the correct sequence. This approach reduced the false reject rate to 0.5%, making a substantial contribution, improving the first pass yield (Quality) and consequently the overall equipment effectiveness* (OEE) by 200%.