Inspecting your printed incoming packaging materials

It does not matter whether you manufacture or package pharmaceuticals, food and drink, cosmetics & toiletries, cigarettes or other high quality branded goods, ensuring that your packaging has been printed correctly, has no content errors and conforms to your original signed-off artwork is vital for both regulatory compliance and image. You may currently do this manually which is time consuming, may lead to operator fatigue and leaves room for errors. Incoming Quality control of printed packaging materials can be carried out with the EyeC Proofiler off-line print inspection system. The Proofiler 400 includes an A3 desk-top scanner (even larger sizes to B0 are available) which is used to scan in the item to be examined. This may be a single label or sheet of labels, folding label booklet, patient information leaflet (insert), foil or folding carton. A customer signed-off proof (PDF or stored image template) is loaded into the system, typically via the local network. Thereafter the system compares the printed item to the proof and highlights any differences that are outside of the allowed tolerances. The examination is completed with the automatic generation of a quality report. The system can inspect as many items as will fit onto the scanner in one pass. Our graphical user interface is extremely simple to use; an inspection is carried out by pressing just five buttons.

Pharmaceutical

EyeC does not only offer a qualified product, for print inspection but we support our pharmaceutical clients during the validation phase by offering relevant documentation including a Functional Requirements Specification (FRS), Installation Qualification (IQ) and Operational Qualification (OQ). The OQ includes a validation card which can also be used for ongoing periodic validation checks of the system. All EyeC products are fully compliant with GAMP4 and 21 CFR part 11.

Patient information leaflets mostly with multilingual content printed in tiny fonts on both sides of very thin sheets, represent the single most difficult challenge even for the most dedicated human proofreader.

With an EyeC Proofiler™, half size sheets or full size sheets can be inspected straight from the press, even if no UV curing is involved. Either system can be equipped with a multiple page leaflet inspection option if your process requires it.

Folding cartons

The EyeC Proofiler™ inspects folding cartons with ease. Single cartons or full press sheets can be inspected against a one-up pdf proof, even for press sheets with nested and butted items. Die cut lines and other non-printable features contained in the proof, such as Braille points, varnish free areas and manufacturing instructions are detected and ignored automatically.

Braille markings on pharmaceutical packaging are required by the EU regulations (Directive 2004/27/EC). Our Braille option for the Proofiler checks for correct encoding, position, shape and height.

Brand Owners

The package appearance should reflect the product inside. With an EyeC Proofiler, you may upgrade your incoming goods inspection and make sure your suppliers keep up with your quality standards. The EyeC Proofiler makes sure printed texts and graphics  on your labels or cartons are identical to the proof and the correct version has been used for printing.

Food Packaging

Strict controls on the information that is printed on food and drink packaging puts responsibilities on food suppliers that are similar to pharmaceutical companies. The food company however is likely to deal with far more products and more frequent changes to the printed information on the packaging. Also the typical supply chain is longer and needs to move faster. Wrong or missing information regarding contents, storing or cooking can lead to product withdrawals and even recalls; both being very expensive for the supplier in costs and reputation. With the barcode option, 1D and 2D barcodes can be verified and graded according to ANSI/ISO standards. Our text compare tool can compare the pack copy or manuscript to the final artwork prior to printing

Tobacco Industry