Track & trace: Russian standard met

From a single bottle, to the box and the complete pallet: Russian Standard ensures the continuous traceability of its vodka products with the right know-how, equipment and data management from HEUFT.

HEUFT EURASIA was responsible for planning, organizing, obtaining and commissioning all the equipment for marking, code reading, serialization and the reliable aggregation of the full containers for a Russian Standard line in St Petersburg where up to 12,000 vodka bottles are filled every hour. The main goal of the project, which was successfully completed in March 2019, was to be able to track exactly which bottle ends up in which box and on which pallet to make this information available so that it can be processed reliably during the complete track & trace procedure.

For this each individual full vodka bottle is given an auxiliary label with a data matrix auxiliary code of up to 16 digits on its closure first of all which can still be read top-down after the full product has later been aggregated closely together in the box. This is no longer possible with the up to 150 digit 2D data matrix code on the tax label on the body / back of each individual full bottle. Therefore a multicode scanner connected to a HEUFT PRIME full container check reads it immediately after it has been applied while still inside the labeller.

 

Reliable traceability and position determination

The bottle is tracked to the second inspection point precisely by means of a shifting register where the auxiliary code on the closure is read from above and linked to the data transferred from the previously verified tax label coding on the back label of each single bottle so that both markings can be clearly allocated. The full bottles then continue on two single lanes before being brought together again in front of the packer and finally twelve of them being aggregated in the boxes.

A second HEUFT PRIME device then checks the auxiliary codes on all the container closures by means of a multicode reader bar once more in the secondary packaging which is still open. A HEUFT xcase rejection system pushes the box in question directly out of the production flow if any are detected which did not appear when checking the code the first time or are unreadable. The exact position of the respective faulty bottle in the box is displayed in the HEUFT NaVi graphical user interface of the HEUFT PRIME terminal at the same time and marked in colour. All the correctly coded containers are displayed there as consecutive numbers which are not repeated. Therefore the unique allocation and traceability of each single bottle is ensured just as its exact position determination inside the respective secondary packaging.

 

Continuous information and real-time data management

The GS1-128 barcodes on the boxes themselves, which are also read at the second HEUFT PRIME device, are in turn allocated to the data matrix code contents on the tax labels of each Russian Standard bottle inside. All the information which has been collected up to this point is recorded in real time and made available by the HEUFT PROFILER for further processing in the database of the customer. Finally further code readers register which box arrives on which pallet. This results in a continuous information chain from the pallet via the box to the unmistakably marked single bottle.