MacGregor’s (Industrial Scale Control System)
Digital control system for industrial weighing scales with active error monitoring and cross-system integration
MacGregor’s Meat and Seafood Ltd. is one of the largest meat and seafood suppliers in Ontario. The company’s reach stretches across the province. They have a reputation for high-quality precooked meat products made to order. Customers can place orders online for varying quantities of products. They have a manually operated packaging and pricing facility with specialized shipping label printers connected to industrial weighing scales that identify various products based on factors including weight and manual input.
- Digital information display with active error monitoring
- Integration with label printing system
- Digital recordkeeping and order history
- Electronic control and automation of industrial weighing scale system
The label printing system was a manually operated program. It used manual input from an employee paired with the information of the order placed on a weighing scale to identify the product weight and other details. The printer would then produce a shipping label for that specific product and weight. If an employee or hardware error occurred, the label would have to be printed again. There was no way for an employee to confirm that the correct information was present before printing or after, meaning that the risk of using an incorrect label was very real.
- Automated digital product information displayed on a separate screen
- Full integration with existing label printing system
- Actively monitors for human and hardware errors prior to label printing
- Ability to reverse (or undo) entered information before printing
- Digitization of the weighing process to improve the speed of information gathering
- Electronic recordkeeping to allow access to order history for verification and reference
When an employee places a product on the weighing platform, the system collects information about the weight and the type of meat or seafood it is. The program uses this data to calculate the price and generate a readout of the product’s details. It then displays this information in a user-friendly structure on a separate screen. Employees can review and confirm the information before approving the label for printing. This reduces printing costs and eliminates the possibility of mistakes made by the system or the employee.
Products placed on the industrial weighing scale no longer need to have their weights read manually by an employee. Instead, the system records the weight digitally. This makes the weighing far more accurate and precise. It also eliminates the risk of errors in weight measurements and other calculations.
The new program uses an API (Application Programming Interface) to communicate with the existing label printing system and weighing platform. It gathers information about weight and pricing from these as well as relevant data from the inventory. The program also sends information to the existing system such as label printing approval and error messages.
Employees can now see visual and audio notifications when the program detects a system error. It constantly monitors for these errors and their causes, whether human or hardware-related. The system is also intelligent enough to understand when a calculation doesn’t make sense, or when the information provided doesn’t match what should be displayed. This eliminates human error as well as hardware issues and saves MacGregor’s the additional costs and negative impact that misprints could have.
Employees can make mistakes when entering information into the system. The weighing platform can also make an error in the weight readout. If the system or an employee detects such an error, they can now reverse the most recent entry without rebooting the entire process. This saves a lot of time in the end. Production speeds up and customers get their orders faster.
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