Tools for making quality

Coding, marking and labelling systems, metal detectors and vision devices, software for monitoring production lines... There are many 4.0 solutions distributed by Nimax, which has always made updating its products and services its competitive factor. Without forgetting the values linked to social and environmental sustainability.

Luciana Guidotti, Stefano Lavorini

“The customer at the center of the company” is almost a mantra for Nimax that, on the Italian market for over 50 years, continues to effectively interpret the role of sole supplier, reviewing and expanding the range of products essential for manufacturing industries - pharmaceutical or food that they are - in terms of coding, traceability and controls.

Even in times of pandemic, explained Stefano Paolucci, Director of Development & Marketing at the Bologna-based company, Nimax has consolidated its position, thanks to excellent results in terms of turnover, 10 new hires and without ever having interrupted operations or made a day of redundancy.

This is undoubtedly due to the quality of the systems distributed exclusively in Italy (Domino, Loma Systems, Nemesis) and of the solutions produced by Nimax itself; but above all, it is due to the skills of Nimax, which is able to offer users and OEMs solutions that are always up-to-date to satisfy the most diverse packaging requirements.

What’s new and what projects are underway?

I would like to remind you that we operate, as distributors, exclusively on the Italian market, supplying coders, printers or control systems to brand owners but also to machine manufacturers. Moreover, we sell not only in Italy but also abroad the two products we manufacture in house, which are very much appreciated by the market: the historical patented “tilting” for the rotation of jars, liquid containers and cans on the production line, as well as the CF118 control system, which checks the integrity of aluminum film or certain types of PVC by detecting the presence of micro-holes, tears or cracks already present in the film or induced during the drawing phase. 

In 2021 we have introduced some new products under the Domino brand. I am referring to the Cx350i high-resolution macro character inkjet marker for direct printing on secondary packaging, which represents the evolution of a product already on the market; it has a simple interface and the same software used on the AX Series micro character printers, which guarantees maximum line efficiency.

Speaking of lines, there is a current need to integrate encoders with artificial vision systems to verify the presence, position, readability and content of the encoding...

Domino has provided answers in this regard as well, designing the R Series system. A quality control that allows to reduce rejects and recall costs, signaling eventual coding errors, avoiding to the companies penalties for the non-compliance with the regulations and the guidelines of the GDO and guaranteeing at the same time the brand protection.

Domino’s R Series system provides a single interface that sends data both to the chamber and to the printer, with the advantage for users of having a single interlocutor able to manage and solve any problems.

The solution foresees various levels of automation: from the simplest, which only verifies the presence of the code, to the control of its readability, to the retroactive modification of the operating parameters of the printer itself.

What are the most recent solutions that you propose from an Industry 4.0 perspective?

As far as Nimax is concerned, we continue to develop an extremely interesting product, which is Line Strategy. It is a software system, or software+hardware, for the interconnection of production lines with management systems and MES that allows, with a single tool even when there are machines and technologies from different manufacturers, full control of the production line or the entire plant. It is a simple and modular system, which can be implemented over time according to different needs, to control and receive feedback practically in real time from all the devices on the line.

An interesting proposal, but what if all the machines are of the latest generation?

This is the beauty of Line Strategy: all that is needed is for the machines and equipment to have a simple serial port. The system activates and sets up control logics on the lines, monitors their efficiency and signals anomalies in order to remove defective batches and reduce waste. The software then acquires production data, which are then exported and organized through Business Intelligence software into reports functional to the specific needs of analysis of different departments (quality control, logistics, marketing, production). In my opinion, this product is the one that is making Nimax take a quantum leap forward in terms of service. 

Are we on the threshold of predictive maintenance?

It is not a chimera, it already exists for Domino machines, but we are getting ready to propose Nimax predictive diagnostics, considering that we represent many other brands. And this software will be the new add-on of Line Strategy.

Moreover, we are launching a remote assistance service, thanks to which it will be possible, through a simple app, to remotely guide maintenance technicians on the line.

So everything is moving in the direction of digitizing production, thus opening up the problem of data sharing between user and supplier...

Our Line Strategy offers, on the one hand, the advantage of not working in the cloud but within the company’s systems and, on the other hand, it makes it possible to obtain an analysis of data that is not exactly predictive but that can allow us to make a series of reliable estimates of company productivity.