Idemitsu Corporation is one of Japan's largest oil conglomerates and a Fortune Global 500 company. Idemitsu Lubricants (China) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Idemitsu Lubricants) is a wholly-owned subsidiary established in July 2003 in the Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area with an investment of US$5 million by Idemitsu Kosan Corporation.
Idemitsu Lubricants operates under the philosophy of "manufacturing lubricants of world-class quality in China," producing and selling high-quality lubricants under the Idemitsu brand. Currently, its annual production capacity is 56,000 kL/year, and its market prospects are promising.
However, the ever-increasing production capacity has brought heavy warehousing work to the lubricant factory, thus requiring the introduction of advanced technologies to ensure the efficiency and accuracy of warehousing management.
Previously, when oil drums were being handled in and out of the warehouse, the factory used manual methods, monitoring and counting at various workstations, due to relatively low production volume. Occasionally, discrepancies would occur between the number of oil drums shipped and the customer's order. If this problem was not properly resolved, it could lead to compensation claims and damage the good cooperative relationship between the manufacturer and the customer.
Figure 1
Furthermore, to facilitate statistics, the production line speed needs to be reduced. However, with increasing market demand and rising shipment volumes, reducing the production line speed would significantly impact factory production efficiency. Therefore, Idemitsu Lubricants urgently needs to implement automated traceability management for its oil drums.
After research, Idemitsu Lubricants decided to add a logistics line and a traceability management system to its factory. A total of four lines will need to be upgraded, with two barcode reading stations on each line. Additionally, the oil drums will have a diameter of 600mm, and the labels will be 24mil QR codes that can be affixed arbitrarily at any angle. The barcode reading stations are shown in Figure 1, and the flow chart for a single line is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2
These code reading stations are:
1) The first station is at the finished oil section and the raw material section. The oil drums pass through one by one, with a field of view of 600mm. Because the oil drums will inevitably shake, there is a 15mm change in depth of field.
2) The second station is to read codes on the elevator entrance platform. There are 6 oil drums on the platform. Two oil drums are placed side by side each time, which requires 1200mm. The code is read from the side of the two parallel drums. The field of view is 1200mm. Moreover, the placement of the oil drums will inevitably be offset, so it is necessary to stabilize at 1300mm for reading.
The challenges of this technological upgrade are: 1) Because the labels are printed on paper and there are many of them, it is difficult to ensure that all the labels are clear and easy to read. Therefore, even when the label printing quality is reduced, a very high reading rate must still be maintained; 2) Although the on-site environment is good, it is normal for the labels to have liquids such as oil or water. If the liquid happens to be on the label surface, it must still be easy to read; 3) The biggest challenge is to ensure that the factory's production line cannot be stopped easily. The code reading pass rate needs to be above 99.7% . Because the factory's daily output is huge, once it stops to troubleshoot problems, the waiting time will be too long, which will greatly affect the production tasks.
In addition, because the field of view (FOV) is relatively large, reading codes in such a large field of view, while also taking cost into consideration, shows that this technical transformation is quite difficult.
At this point, Daifuku Logistics (China) Automation Co., Ltd., the equipment integrator for this technical upgrade project, recommended Cognex's DataMan barcode reader. The DataMan barcode reader successfully solved the problem of large field-of-view barcode reading, featuring a unique decoding algorithm that results in outstanding reading speed and field of view. As a machine vision expert, Cognex possesses unparalleled advantages in image processing. In its factory applications at Idemitsu Lubricants, its stable performance and ease of operation quickly won the approval of Idemitsu Lubricants' equipment engineers.
They found that after introducing the DataMan300 series barcode readers, the factory's production landscape was greatly improved: 1) It freed up their hands, eliminating the need for a fixed number of employees to count and sort items on the conveyor line and at the inbound and outbound locations, which was very convenient; 2) It improved efficiency, significantly reducing the time spent on warehousing and turnover; 3) It enabled traceability management, which, together with the control and recording system, greatly facilitated the long-term traceability of products.
An engineer from Idemitsu Lubricating Equipment stated, "The DataMan300 series barcode readers feature the powerful 2DMax QR code decoding algorithm, ensuring stable reading even of low-contrast codes and codes that may have uneven reflections due to oil stains or other factors."
"The emergence of the DataMan300 series barcode readers has solved our problems, easily handling barcode reading issues with such a large field of view as 1300mm," the Idemitsu Lubricating Oil Equipment Engineer concluded. "At the same time, the barcode readers can be connected in series through networking, making image and data uploading and settings very convenient, allowing on-site workers to save too much time in subsequent maintenance, and the stable performance effectively guarantees the needs of long-term continuous production in the factory."
