As the orthopaedics company of Johnson & Johnson, DePuy Synthes offers the world’s most comprehensive portfolio of orthopaedic and MedTech solutions to help heal and restore movement for millions of patients worldwide. DePuy Manufacturing Company was founded in 1895 and was the world’s very first orthopaedic manufacturing business.

DePuy Synthes pack their medical cement into a printed carton along with various items including a user manual, printed by MBM. Scales on the assembly line weigh each printed box to make sure all components are included. Occasionally, kits were being rejected due to a change in the box weight, causing downtime for DePuy. While DePuy carried out their own investigation into all the components in the kits, we adopted a meticulously thorough approach to ensure our user manuals weren’t causing the issues. We were conscious that a missing or additional section in the manual could potentially affect kit weight.

To eliminate this potential issue, MBM installed a barcode recognition system on the binding line. Outside the pages’ trim marks, a unique barcode was printed on each section, enabling it to be scanned as it was being fed into the binding line. If the barcode didn’t scan correctly the machine would stop, guaranteeing that every single section on every single manual was checked and verified as being 100% correct. Along with the barcode recognition system, MBM also installed scales at the end of the binding line, where every single manual is weighed, again to verify that the contents of the manual are 100% correct.

Following their own investigation, combined with the solution we provided, the issue on the customer's kitting line has completely disappeared and there hasn’t been a single case of line stoppages due to changes in the kit weight.