Tasmanian meat company Greenham & Sons decided to tackle a fairly common manufacturing challenge last year.
It found the processing speed of its multi-million dollar meat processing operation far outweighed its ability to label products.
When Greenham sought advice from Result Group on some options to upgrade its labelling system, the equipment supplier recommended it adopt the HERMA multi-purpose Meat Tray Label and Sleeve Applicator.
This is a new type of labelling machine that can handle all packing formats used in the industry through one machine, according to Result, as well as perform both price weigh and standard weight product labelling.
The company adopted the system has been extremely happy with its performance, according to Greenham production manager Michael White.
“The move from hand to automatic label application has effectively quadrupled our throughput of beef products," White said.
"Previously, our production limitation was the label application step, but now because of the automatic HERMA label applicator we are more than keeping up with the speed of product processing.”
A major advantage to Greenham of the HERMA Applicator, according to Result, is its versatility – a number of different product sizes and meat shapes can be put through this single labelling machine.
The system also weighs every item, so the labels not only include the exact weight of each individual pack but can include the retail price based on the pre-set price per kilo.
For Greenham, this has meant it can now create shelf-ready products before they’ve even left the plant. Details are automatically extracted from the Greenham’s ERP system to give it a problem-free changeover and rock solid data transfers for the production team.
The electronic weight functionality also results in the automatic rejection of packs outside of spec, so if a pack is under or over weight it is not put through.
This removes the need for the meat to be weighed by hand while processing, which creates efficiencies and speeds up the entire processing stage.
The HERMA multi-purpose Meat Tray Label and Sleeve Applicator also prints both barcodes and QR codes on the labels for Greenham.
It is also able to top and bottom label products in one pass with excellent accuracy, according to Result, which makes it ideal for traceability and multi-lingual labelling for export markets.
