What Are The Lifetime Costs of Running Food X-Ray Inspection Equipment?

Author Christy Draus Head of Marketing

The umbrella covering operational excellence is widening and encompasses the methodologies of Lean Manufacturing, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, PDCA and other models to help you with your continuous improvement efforts. While you’re striving to reach your goals through these and other initiatives, optimizing multifunctional x-ray inspection technologies not only find and reject contaminants but offer many other capabilities for improved safety, quality, traceability and productivity to help you meet your targets.

The Value of Quality Food Inspection

Can you put a price tag on quality? Maybe not—but quality assurance is another story. Food businesses know all too well that ensuring the quality of the products that leave their lines requires significant spending. However, cutting corners or failing to invest in quality altogether can ultimately drive businesses to pay a much steeper fee when trying to rectify product recalls and rebuild customer trust. This leaves food processors with one big question when choosing their food inspection tools and equipment: what’s really worth the price?

Up-Front Cost vs. Lifetime Spend

That brings us to analyze the differences between up-front cost and lifetime spend. Upfront cost includes what you pay to get a machine out onto your floor: the out-the-door price of the unit or system, the cost of transport, installation, employee training, and so forth. It’s what you can expect to pay out of pocket when you first get your new system. Lifetime costs are everything that comes after. This includes the cost of production halts for planned maintenance, the cost of software and hardware upgrades over time, and the like. Often overlooked are the unexpected costs that come with system failures, part replacements, repair costs, and unplanned production downtime. The expected life span of the equipment itself can also give an idea of how those costs might be distributed, and how long it will be until you have to begin weighing up-front costs once again for new equipment.

While lifetime costs seem like a necessary consideration when selecting food x-ray inspection equipment, they sometimes don’t get considered at all. Because this number isn’t immediately apparent, the up-front cost of the system can hold more weight because at the time of purchase, it seems more real. However, the truth is that the lifetime cost of a system is just as real, and it can be the difference between achieving operational excellence or scrambling to avoid a deficit.

The line price of a food analysis system may be the first thing that you see, but we urge food x-ray inspection equipment shoppers to take a step back and analyze the lifetime costs to get the full picture. When you combine these two, you get what’s called the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): a more comprehensive way to understand the full cost of your equipment.

So, Is X-Ray Worth The Cost?

With TCO in mind, it’s important to realize that spending more now doesn’t necessarily mean you’re guaranteed to yield greater savings later. It’s not that simple. What it does mean is that you should carefully think about what you need out of your food inspection tools and equipment to figure out what you’re willing to invest in it. With a wide variety of standalone machines and comprehensive systems available to purchase, today’s x-ray inspection equipment prices can range between as low as $60,000 to upwards of $500,000. To discover if x-ray inspection is truly “worth it” for your operations, it will require a thorough analysis of your needs and a given system’s capabilities.

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Where Food X-Ray Inspection Equipment Fits In Your Operations

In the broad field of food manufacturing, production, and processing, achieving operational excellence is a team effort. Advanced inspection technology is a key player, as manufacturers can take advantage of x-ray systems and accompanying software to find and reject contaminants, perform ongoing quality checks and link information back into their respective quality assurance systems. By taking advantage of the multifunctionality of inline x-ray technologies, you can reduce inefficiencies and tighten up your production lines. X-ray inspection systems can be seamlessly integrated into a range of tools and programs such as Lean Manufacturing, Total Quality Management, PDCA, SPC, and Six Sigma to help you move forward with your continuous improvement efforts.

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Five Ways to Achieve Operational Excellence with Multifunctional X-Ray Inspection

By installing x-ray systems at various points in the production process, you can enhance your operational excellence by:

1. Find more and smaller contaminants: The latest inspection technologies enable the detection of even the smallest contaminants that can provoke a recall or cause a safety issue. Eagle offers a variety of high-performing x-ray machines, from bulk materials to finished packages.
2. Discover defects: X-ray machines also can conduct important quality checks to determine if products have any defects that may lead to customer dissatisfaction or other issues. For example, if you’re pouring liquid chocolate into molds, you want to make sure there are no foreign bodies but you also want to know if the product is being coated evenly. Or if you are processing meat, you can measure the actual fat content and weight of meat going through the inspection system to ensure that final products are regularly meeting target specifications.
3. Increase productivity and elevate line performance: X-ray systems prevent downtime that can be caused by any number of preventable issues, such as rocks or metal pieces that can move downstream and damage equipment or the need to rework product due to an error or inconsistency. By quickly identifying and removing products with defects or potential safety hazards, lines can run more efficiently. Streamlining labor is possible too. By automating inspection and capturing information and images, a manufacturer can redeploy employees on the line who were previously inspecting products visually.
4. Improve and integrate traceability: Integrated inspection technologies with advanced software solutions like Eagle’s SimulTask™ PRO and TraceServer™, delivers unmatched performance throughout every phase of the production process. Data captured by the Eagle systems is stored, easily accessed and often available in real-time. Inspection systems with item-level traceability can link inspection data to a unique identifier printed on each item.
5. Lower the total cost of ownership: Operational excellence encompasses systems that can be operated at peak performance with less waste. Eagle’s systems offer a lower total cost of ownership thanks to their robust construction that requires less maintenance and offers a longer running life.

Ultimately, we’re here to help you improve your product and run your lines in the most efficient way possible. Operational excellence is a company goal, but it’s an overarching goal across the industry, too. Your game plan should look at improved and advanced technologies that enhance your operations, and keep your products and your brand safe.