For industrial-scale food producers, staying compliant with a patchwork of state, federal, and international regulations is challenging. The State of Alabama requires commercial manufacturing operations like Mar-Jac to maintain National Type Evaluation Program (NTEP) certification on their weighing and measuring instruments. Not only do the scales and other hardware devices themselves need to be certified, but the software reading data from these devices must also conform to the standards of the National Conference on Weights and Measures, ensuring the manufacturer’s data is accurate.
"Our software is flexible to handle multiple certification schemes," said Tyler Carroll, technical project manager for CAT Squared. “For our scale application, a scale is connected to a PC showing weights on the indicator, our software grabs that string of communication and displays it on the screen.”
“We were pleased that CAT Squared’s system met the certification requirements so that we could continue to produce weighed product,” said Billy McNeil, Mar-Jac’s plant manager in Jasper, AL.
“Plant managers and executives like our system because it holds scale operators accountable,” explains Carroll. “One concern in the industry is operators ‘thumbing’ the scale to make their weight pass so that they don’t have to repack product. Our system will not allow this because if a weight is fluctuating on a scale, a label can’t be printed. So, if an operator tries to press down on the scale, the scale is sensitive enough to detect the fluctuation, and our software will prevent a label from being printed. If a scale is having any kind of error, like the load cell being over or underweight capacity, for example, our system will not allow a label to be printed.”
Weighing and labeling software like CAT Squared’s system ensures that plants are within compliance and producing a product that meets their customer’s specifications.
Technical Resource:
Tyler Carroll
CAT Squared Technical Project Manager
tyler.carroll@catsquared.com