Yalumba Winery
Australia’s most historic family-owned winery, Yalumba Winery was experiencing challenges with ageing equipment on their cask and glass bottling lines and increasing ongoing running costs. We upgraded their lines to Domino D320i CO2 Laser Coders which helped them increase uptime, reduce costs, and improve traceability.
The Challenge
No business wants an issue with tracing its manufactured product throughout the supply chain. Total traceability is critically important for businesses that send their products out locally and around the world.
This was one of the problems facing Yalumba, a world-renowned family-owned winery located in the heart of the Barossa Valley wine region, in operation for over five generations.
Since 1849, Yalumba’s focus has been on ensuring that the same attention to detail is put into every bottle of wine – regardless of variety, quantity or price – knowing that the reputation of their wine is only as good as the next bottle that a customer drinks.
Yalumba had two laser coders on their glass bottling line and one inkjet coder using yellow ink on their cask line. These machines were ageing technology, which were becoming more expensive to run due to the required downtime for servicing and maintenance. Replacement parts were becoming difficult to obtain as the equipment had become obsolete, meaning repairs could possibly be quite lengthy. In addition, the use of yellow inks in the inkjet coder ran the risk of being illegible on the product packaging.
All of this meant that Yalumba was facing the potential for their vital traceability codes to be either unreadable or, worse, completely missing. From a supply chain perspective, this information is critical and without it Yalumba’s production lines would immediately stop. To put this into perspective, unplanned downtime to Yalumba meant the possibility for delays in meeting shipment deadlines and getting the product out to customers, plus the risk of a loss of customer trust and decrease in overall productivity. It was imperative to eliminate the risk before it became a problem.
Yalumba knew that modern laser coders were the answer and they had experimented with a mix of solutions from different suppliers, but none had borne fruit.
The Solution
Yalumba needed to improve traceability and reduce unplanned downtime caused by their ageing coders. They also needed to reduce costs, improve performance, increase overall reliability in their manufacturing plant, and achieve a legible, high-quality permanent code on their products.
In turning to insignia, they chose another family-owned Australian business with similar values to their own, and a partner that had been supporting their labelling needs for over 25 years.
It was immediately apparent that Yalumba’s two existing laser coders on their bottling line were end of life. insignia replaced the ageing machines on both the glass bottling line and cask line with three Domino D320i CO2 laser coders and added a G20i thermal inkjet coder on their carton line for an improved quality carton code.
The Domino D320i CO2 laser coder is in a league of its own, offering maintenance-free and consumable-free technology, eliminating consumable expenditure. It also delivers a permanent and tamper-proof code and is a class leader when it comes to Overall Equipment Effectiveness (or OEE).
The Results
Yalumba’s goal was to improve the quality of the code on their product for traceability purposes, reduce their ongoing costs, and increase reliability on their bottling line – and this was achieved.
In terms of a more readable code and improvements to traceability, using laser on their wine casks instead of inkjet provided a more permanent, effective code. They also achieved greater readability than with the yellow ink they had been using previously.
For reducing costs and improving reliability, there would be no ongoing running costs and very minimal maintenance costs with this high-quality coding solution, insignia would provide ongoing technical support, and Yalumba’s total cost of ownership on capital equipment would drop. A significant contributor to this was the elimination of fluid consumables from their ongoing running costs. Finally, laser coders with extraction units were offered on Yalumba’s glass bottling line, as they would remove potential glass particulates from the air, making the environment safer for operators.
Ultimately, insignia’s relationship with Yalumba has been one of shared values and similar business approaches. The longevity of our relationship is testament to these shared values and to the solutions and support we provide – in this case, improving the quality of the code on their product, improving its traceability, and reducing their total cost of ownership on capital equipment.
