In today’s production environments, product safety and the risks of contamination are more ingrained in operations than ever before. No matter what industry your company specializes in (food, beverage, pharmaceutical, etc.), the quality of your products is as decisive for your brand as the actual goods you create.

All steps you may take to preserve product safety mean nothing if your production equipment itself puts goods at risk. In many cases we encounter every year, product contamination is not due to the carelessness of workers along the production line, but rather to accidents involving loose component parts.

Limiting Loose Component Parts on the Production Floor

This is where fully detectable components can play an essential role in production. By replacing equipment parts and floor-level components with metal and x-ray detectable steel, silicone, rubber and plastic, you can limit contamination with much more reliability than traditional countermeasures. Detectable components prevent equipment contamination to an extent that just isn’t possible with employee training or conventional inspection.

If your production equipment or line workers employ any of the following component parts on the production floor, there’s a good chance you can see huge safety benefits by replacing those components with fully detectable counterparts throughout your facility:

• Cable ties

• Stretch wrapping

• Rubber bands or small rubber parts

• Plastic or metal pens, and touch-screen styluses

• Paddles

• Scrapers

• O-rings or quad rings

• Gloves, hairnets or ID tags

• Studs, gaskets, tubing and cables

Essentially, any non-detectable, nuisance production parts can be replaced with fully detectable components to improve product safety and reliability along your production line, and protect your brand from devastating recalls.

Customizable Components to Meet the Needs of Your Industry

The metal and x-ray detectable components many product manufacturers use today to limit their equipment contamination are customized to fit the precise needs of their operations. Everything from gasket, ring and standard component size to hygiene color can be alternated for the specific parameters of your business.

Completely food-safe and compliant with HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) standards, detectable components make it possible for food and pharmaceutical producers to assure the high quality of their products with far more accuracy than inspection equipment or employee training alone. In fact, safety-compromising material fragments and contaminants may even be coming from your current inspection systems.

Detectable component parts can be custom made for detection by metal detection systems or x-ray inspection units. For compatibility with metal detection units, components are created with a small, food-safe proportion of metallic trace elements, or lined with an equally safe metal strip, both of which are fully detectable by today’s most common metal detection equipment.

If your facilities use x-ray inspection systems in place of metal detection, detectable components can be engineered from various plastics for full visibility during product inspection. These replacement components are entirely food safe, and will not compromise the safety of your goods in ways that conventional, contaminating materials can.

There is no sure way to eliminate contamination risk along your production line; assurance with detectable components is not 100%. However, you can significantly lower your risks by integrating detectable component parts and tools throughout your facilities, and limit your chances of contamination to a bare minimum.

These component parts offer further benefits beyond production equipment safety to the various industries they serve, including:

• Decreased labor, material and operation costs

• Minimized product loss, whether by reducing component loss or recall

• Optimization of detection systems, whether x-ray or metal detectors

• Versatile detection; most components can be reliably identified for packaged, free-flowing or even sealed products

Detectable components, made as small as 1mm and as large as metal detection tubes, can all be reliably detected through conventional inspection systems, and limit the risks posed by equipment contamination at all points in a production line. Rubber, silicone and steel detectable components can help you avoid expensive system down time and improve product rejection more reliably than with product inspection equipment alone.

Loose component parts and “under the radar” material fragments can spell disaster for your products, brand and consumer image. While high-powered inspection systems, employee training and similar steps are crucial to the safety of your products, detectable components provide a further form of quality assurance for practically limitless production industries.

To learn more about detectable components, X-ray Inspection and metal detection please contact PLAN Automation here.