Toly, a leader in the manufacture of cosmetic packaging, has adopted Spark from Scortex, an automated quality inspection solution powered by artificial intelligence, for its production lines. In use on three production lines, this technology aims to reduce waste rates and improve product quality. In our interview, Olaf Zahra, Technical Director and Sustainability at Toly, explains the motivations behind this choice and the results achieved.

 Can you introduce us to Toly ?

Olaf Zahra : Toly is a manufacturer and supplier in the cosmetic industry. We produce packaging for skincare, color cosmetics, perfumes, and other areas of beauty.

What was your challenge regarding quality control?

Olaf Zahra : Cosmetic packaging often has complex decorations and some of them are very fine. If we rely solely on operator inspection, it is sometimes impossible to detect all defects. We needed an automated system to carry out a quality control of 100% of the products we manufacture.

What were your quality control objectives?

Olaf Zahra : Our main objective is related to the fact that some of the very fine texts written on our products are legally binding, and because they are very fine, anomalies can easily pass through the quality control processes undetected. Implementing a system that detects the problem immediately can reduce rejections and aim for a waste rate of less than 1%, even on very fine decorations.

What results and gains have been achieved through the deployment of Spark?

Olaf Zahra : We have already used vision systems, but these systems were always very complicated to set up. Training the system always took hours, days, sometimes weeks. The biggest advantage we have seen with the Spark system is the ease of configuration. We can switch from inspecting one decoration to another in a few minutes, an hour at most, rather than several days.

Sometimes, it takes a few minutes for the operator to realize that the quality of the product has changed. However, in just one minute, we are already processing 50 to 60 pieces, and every minute that passes represents significant rejections. Detecting the problem immediately, stopping the process, and making adjustments gives you a considerable advantage in terms of reducing waste rates.

Have you achieved your quality objectives with Spark?

Olaf Zahra : Absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, the ease of use of the system is the biggest advantage. And the investment is more than compensated by the reduction in rejections and waste rates.

Do you plan to deploy Spark on other production lines?

 Olaf Zahra : Yes, we installed our first Spark kit about 18 months ago. We have a total of 3, and we plan to deploy them until we cover all our production processes with decoration. We also want to try the system on other processes besides decoration.

 With the adoption of Spark, Toly has reached an important milestone in automating the quality control of its cosmetic packaging. This technology has reduced waste rates and improved product quality. The results achieved lead Toly to consider deploying Spark in other production sites, marking a significant step in their pursuit of performance and efficiency.

Spark is an automated quality inspection solution powered by AI that offers a fast, easy-to-deploy approach without costly expertise. All of these considerable advantages for production sites looking to initiate their transition from manual to automated quality inspection or to optimize their existing quality control processes, resulting in high-performance quality control, mastery of quality costs, and larger-scale production, as well as reduced customer complaints.

Spark is developed and fully assembled by Scortex in France.  

This type of use case precisely represents the ambitions outlined in the announcement of our seed funding, where we express our desire to industrialize a reliable and scalable vision solution.

Here are other articles that might interest you :

·        Automated quality inspection with Spark: what are the real advantages ?

·        The applications of automated quality control with AI in the cosmetic industry

·        Case study: lipstick manufacturing

·        Video interview with Olaf Zahra from Toly