7METTLER TOLEDO IndMagazine 2/2005

Established in 1898, Robert McBrideis a multinational business with aturnover of over £500 million. Oper-ating out of fifteen factories in sixcountries, it specialises in privatelabel and contract manufacturing oflaundry, household, cleaning andpersonal care products.

The site in Bradford, UK, which manu-factures personal care products, facedproblems in its label store. The depart-ment struggled to determine the numberof labels left on part used reels as eachreel had to be weighed and the numberof remaining labels manually calculated– a time consuming and often inaccu-rate process.

The company has used METTLER TOLEDO as an equipment supplier formany years and has its equipment inother areas of the site as well as at sitesacross the UK. Vincent Pemberton, labelstore co-ordinator, says “We already have METTLER TOLEDO scales installed inour production area which meet all ourrequirements, so this prompted us toagain choose the company as oursupplier.” Steve Littlewood, sectionleader, adds: “I originally contactedMartin Bennett at METTLER TOLEDOwho was very helpful. After a site visitand with Martin’s knowledge oftest/weighing equipment and my knowl-edge and experience of our business, weselected the equipment as being costeffective and meeting our current andfuture needs.”

After further discussions with the RobertMcBride site in Middleton – which usesthe same system to combat this problem– the Viper scale range was chosen asVincent explains: “We chose the ViperMBSC 15 LA for a number of reasons – wewanted a scale that could accuratelyweigh and count labels that weighedonly 0.01g as well as a scale that couldstore up to 1500 individual codes. It alsoneeded to be user friendly and easy toinput and extract information from andthe ViperMB scale offered all of this.”

In addition a printer was required torecord all the data for future reference.“We decided on the RSP42 printer so wecould crosscheck everything weighed onthe scale against our SAP system. Theprinter is very simple to operate and ourexperience with the printer in otherapplications has shown it to be very reli-able” adds Vincent.

The Viper scale installed offers efficientpiece counting and convenient data cap-ture combined with great flexibility andoutstanding precision. It has numerousfeatures including memory for 1500records, barcode reading and writingcapabilities, graphical display and pro-

Counting challenge solved byMETTLER TOLEDO

Steve Littlewood, admin section leader, Vincent Pemberton, label store co-coordinator

grammable function keys – meeting thecompany’s specific requirements. ThreeRS232 and a PS2 keyboard interfacecome as standard and there’s an optionof exchanging the third RS232 interfacefor a second scale input. In addition therugged design makes this scale ideal forindustrial environments.

The new equipment is used to weighlabels left over from the production areato accurately determine the number oflabels remaining on a reel. “We sendreels of labels to the production areawhich are applied to the various bottlesof personal care products. Any label reelsleft over from a process order arereturned to the label store where theyneed to be accurately weighed to calcu-late the remaining labels on the individ-ual reel so they can be added to the stock.If accuracy is not achieved then otherproduction lines could stop due to lack oflabels” says Vincent.

The new system has dramaticallyimproved processes as information isnow stored on a database which hasmade the process much simpler as wellas eliminating errors created by manual-ly inputting data. The scale provides aneasy way of counting labels left on reelsby use of an accurate counting scale witha built-in database of product informa-tion. “We are now confident of theamount of labels on a part reel and inour stock levels. This accuracy has pre-vented production downtime due to labelshortages and has had a positive effect onour label stock accuracy.”

4www.mcbride.co.uk4www.mt.com/themag

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