Drinking water labeling for manufacturers

Dmitry Medvedev has sent a proposal to the Council of the Eurasian Economic Commission to expand the list of mandatory goods labeling. The government proposed adding eight more groups of goods to it, including drinking water. The authorities plan to create a system for tracking goods until 2024. This should help fight counterfeiting and tax evasion.

In accordance with Government Decree No. 348 of March 27, 2020, a drinking water labeling experiment has been launched on the territory of the Russian Federation. The experiment will last from April 1, 2020 to March 1, 2021. The start date for mandatory labeling will be determined upon its completion.

The list of goods subject to labeling will include goods under the following FEACN codes

We have developed several solutions especially for drinking water manufacturers in collaboration with industrial printers and machine vision systems manufacturers.

Solutions fall into two categories – automatic and manual systems.

Automatic systems enable full automatisation of marking, reading codes, control, etc. Designed for high-performance lines.

Manual systems are the lightest solutions that allow, using a computer, handheld barcode scanner or hand-fed autoscanner and software, to label, control, and then enter the information into a database.

Drinking water production technological processes

1. Printer/Code Applicator
2. Camera
3. Bottle rejector
4. Signal light
5. Lightning equipment
6. Box Recipient
7. Labeling printer
8. Scanner
9. PC accounting system, camera control and data
10. Network switch
11. Factory server receiving data from the accounting system

List of control objects

The product accounting system is designed for piece-by-piece quantitative accounting of manufactured products, accounting for products as part of boxes and pallets. The following objects and procedures are subject to accounting:

• single bottles (cans);
• packaging in boxes (boxes);
• boxes in pallets.

Accounting automation object

The object – an automatic system of piece accounting (ACS PC) has three control points for finished products: a single product zone, a box formation zone and a pallet formation zone. The product passes each of the areas, the finished product is automatically recorded.

Single product area

When the product passes the unit product zone, the following technological operations are carried out:

• applying a code on the bottle by a DataMatrix laser printer;
• controlling the application of the DataMatrix code using a verification scanner;
• emergency line stop in case of multiple error of DataMatrix code verification.

Box forming area

The following technological operations take place in the box formation area:

• placing several bottles in one box;
• reading DataMatrix codes of all bottles in one box;
• controlling the codes of all bottles of the box read by DataMatrix;
• Generating a label in the software with the DataMatrix code for the box;
• sending a task to print a label to a thermal transfer printer;
• aggregating printed DataMatrix box code with DataMatrix bottles codes;
• rejecting boxes with errors in reading or checking the DataMatrix bottles codes.

Pallet forming area

The following technological operations take place in the pallet formation area:

• adding DataMatrix box codes to the list of formed pallets;
• stacking boxes on a pallet;
• generating a label for a pallet in software;
• sending a task to print a label with a pallet code to a thermal transfer printer;
• DataMatrix aggregation of box codes and printed pallet code.

System’s main functions

• Determining the rejection reason, informing the line operator of necessity to perform regulated actions;
• Maintaining a database and receiving statistical reports (all actions and events);
• Forming and storing archive recipes for a technological line and selecting the current one;
• Generating report files with any given structure and transferring over the network;
• Ability to import/export data with company’s data systems according to a separately agreed-to algorithm;
• User-friendly human-machine interface with different access levels.

We provide service support for our solutions.