Digitalizing Meat Processing: Vestra Inet's Control System Expertise
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
- 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
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.
PDF Generator
- Automatic PDF generator
- Picture-to-PDF conversion & Searchable PDF
- Generate PDF for product configurator
Modern websites have dynamic pages where the information that is displayed is generated from databases based on input from different systems such as product builders, ordering systems, e-commerce platforms, and more. However, there are situations where this data must be saved or printed. Examples of these situations include invoices, order information, shipping details, inventory data, performance statistics etc. The most common format to save the data in is PDF.
Automatic PDF generators were designed to store this unique information for later reference and put it into a more accessible format for emailing, printouts or backups. In unique situations, scanned images were converted to searchable text in PDF format to facilitate navigation through archives with large quantities of scanned information and documents.
Electronics Control System
- Easy management of data
- Digitalization of manual equipment
- Integrated control system for multiple stages
Some companies still utilize manually controlled equipment such as industrial ovens, grinders, and more. They face multiple issues due to the manual operation of these equipment and systems, including human error leading to bad batches, delays in production, and more problems. Upgrading the equipment can be very costly, so investing in new machinery isn’t feasible.
Custom control systems were built to automate and coordinate manually controlled existing systems for clients. In each case, machinery was digitized with feedback control features to automatically adjust process execution based on electronic reports. A central computer interface was implemented to enable control of multiple machines and systems using a single terminal. Additionally, an automatic operational history recording system was built for specific clients which would generate performance reports and store them electronically. Based on requirements, clients could also program special custom processes with multiple stages for execution on different machines.
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