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Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence's Optiv 3.2.2 multi-sensor machine equipped with palletizing mode offers precise and automated dimensional measurements of L'Oréal capsules and bottles and allows the development of packaging expertise on other analysis criteria such as deformation and bottle verticality.
Founded in France in 1909, the L'Oréal group is the world's number one cosmetics company. Dedicated to the beauty profession, the group has 88,000 employees worldwide. it relies on its excellence in research and innovation and its 4,100 researchers to meet all the aspirations of beauty in the world, and has made ambitious commitments to sustainable development by 2030, combining its entire ecosystem for a more inclusive and sustainable society.
With more than 10,000 employees in 44 production sites in charge of 36 international brands, L'Oréal France represents more than a quarter of the group's global production. The 240 people at the Rambouillet production site, near Paris, are in charge of the production of nearly 300 million units per year of "haircare" and "skincare" of the shampoo, conditioner and shower type, including those for the Elsève and DOP brands.
L'Oréal's Marketing & Development teams create each new product (franchise) in a different shape, color and/or material depending on the product categories or target markets. Recycled resin bottles represent, for example, one of the latest ecological innovations of the L'Oréal Paris brand. Each new creation requires adaptation in the production processes. Specific tests are therefore necessary to ensure that any new packaging can be adapted to the packaging lines. They are also essential to validate that production will be done in the right conditions with the right yields and therefore without loss of pace in the medium term. Éric Debreuille, chemical engineer is responsible for packaging at the Rambouillet site and in charge of this process. To this, he works closely with the group's centralized packaging/development departments as well as with the factory's packaging technical teams.
"My role is, among other things, to ensure that design choices and packaging equipment are aligned. To do this, on the basis of the product definition, a formalized risk analysis makes it possible to evaluate the impacts of packaging developments on industrial equipment. It is thus necessary to ensure the organization, monitoring and support of the tests by synthesizing the results that will make it possible to validate or not the technical choice," explains Éric Debreuille.
Two quality systems thus coexist at L'Oréal: design quality (packaging) and conformity quality (production). Éric Debreuille navigates between the two. In design, he contributes to the product definition and the industrial feasibility (tests) that he builds and realizes with the centralized packaging and the technical teams, allowing or not the approval of the new packaging item.
In the site's quality and compliance department, laboratory technicians check whether the items produced by L'Oréal's suppliers are compliant, more particularly during a first production of a new format or during a change of material. The specifications and specifications of these new packagings specify the dimensional measurements to be carried out.
The Optiv M offers precision, reliability and speed of measurements of vials and capsules as well as real expertise. "We used to do our dimensional measurements using hand tools, including electronic calipers. However, some measures were very complex to implement, especially those to be carried out inside a capsule and even on a bottle," recalls Éric Debreuille.
It is from a request for analysis from the company Sematec, member of the Hexagon group for industrial equipment projects, that the need for a three-dimensional measuring machine to help develop a real packaging expertise, mainly on bottles, to result. This is how the Optiv multi-sensor machine was presented at L'Oréal. "Our decision-making group, made up of the quality manager, the laboratory manager and myself, stipulated that the new tool should not only allow a more reliable, faster and automated dimensional analysis but also allow to establish a concrete interpretation of the deformations of the faces & verticality observed on our vials. The goal is to correlate these measures to our quality problems found on the packaging lines"
Combined with a series of sensors for very fast, accurate and versatile measurements, the Optiv M 3.2.2 was the ideal solution for all the inspections and analyses sought by L'Oréal. "We were quickly able to reduce the control time on the vials by five while guaranteeing more reliable measurements thanks to the combination of the machine's vision and probe techniques, perfectly adapted to the measurement of certain dimensions. And the measurement time of the capsules has been reduced by ten thanks to the palletization of the system adapted to our needs, says Éric Debreuille. Opus, a partner of Hexagon, has been able to design sophisticated quality posages adapted to our various items to be controlled and thus optimize the measurements made with our three-dimensional machine. This equipment makes it possible, among other things, to compensate for the limited volume of Optiv 3.2.2 and thus to be able to measure all bottle formats regardless of their size. »
L'Oréal uses the PC-DMIS CAD++ software coupled with the Inspect operator interface with the palette option as well as the Hero analysis report software, all from Hexagon. "I have already been able to design about twenty PC-DMIS programs and train three laboratory technicians by machine, in analysis. I discover new possibilities every day and can be reassured to see our level of Packaging expertise increase even more in the coming months," concludes Éric Debreuille.
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