
Dipix Introduces Industry's First Intelligent CounterGrouper Technology
Ottawa, Canada, August 15, 2007 - Dipix
Technologies Inc., a Tarquin Group company (TSX
VENTURE: TQN), today announced that it
has designed the industry's first fully integrated
system to inspect, reject, count and group frozen
dough and par-baked product. The company has filed
a provisional patent application for the technology.
The CounterGrouper enables manufacturers of frozen grain-based products to virtually eliminate product give-away through accurate box counts and including only in-spec product. In an average bakery, two or three items per box are commonly given away to ensure minimum consumer standards. In some cases counts can vary by 10 or 20 units. Dipix's technology achieves 99 percent accuracy on a given count, reducing the average to 0.2 items per box.
Part of Dipix's unique Intelligent Materials Handling platform for manufactured food products, the CounterGrouper provides inspecting, sorting, and counting of articles traveling on a conveyor and grouping of these articles accurately by count for packing. This is the industry's first system for material handling situations in which it is not practical or desirable to singulate the product (put the product into a single-file stream), and for facilities where rapid changeover to different shaped or sized articles is required.
The new Dipix Technologies system can inspect randomly positioned and randomly spaced articles and incorporates a design where each article is virtually labelled as to count, positional alignment and class (labelled as acceptable or for rejection). This enables rejection of defective articles and accurate count as articles are grouped before they are dropped into a box for shipment. Accurate inspection allows broken, double and poor symmetry articles and other defects to be identified. Exact knowledge of the position of each accepted article enables exact counting. Product is grouped at high speed and released into packing containers at the flow rate of the plant.
"Our unique real-time counting ability generates
new value for the customer on several levels," said
Dipix President John Lawrence. "Our data
delivers detailed information directly from the
inspection/rejection system that has many valuable
uses further along the manufacturing line. The end
result is better performance at the macro and micro
levels of the operation."
Dipix technology inspects, sorts and positions grain-based manufactured foods in high speed manufacturing environments. Based on the identification of the state, position and velocity of any baked product, Dipix systems can convert a random flow of product from the bakery stream into a well managed, fully-in-spec and in-position flow of product to downstream packing or cutting equipment. Analysis and reporting provides detailed or summary information directly to bakery management and shift staff. All Dipix systems can be customized to manage automatic rejection of defects based on product-specific criteria. They allow immediate changeover between product configurations with no physical equipment changes.
In October, 2007 Dipix will be exhibiting at the International Baking Exposition
in Orlando, Florida. For more information, please
visit www.ibie2007.com/Orlando.asp.
About Dipix
Dipix Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of Tarquin Group (TSX VENTURE: TQN),
is the world leader in delivery of automated inspection
and quality analysis systems for the on-line inspection
of manufactured food products. The company integrates
leading edge optical inspection with mechanical
handling and management reporting to deliver the
industry's best vision-based quality inspection
systems. Dipix systems are used by leading manufactured
food companies to reduce operating costs, pinpoint
process errors, reduce variability, and increase
the volume of in-spec delivered goods. Dipix has
over 200 installations in high volume manufacturers
of processed foods - including many major international
corporations. The company was founded in 1992 and
is headquartered in Ottawa Canada. For more information,
visit www.dipix.com.
Media please contact:
Maggie Patterson
613-614-2053
Maggie@hbsmarketing.com
DIPIX corporate:
Laura Dierker
613-596-4942
ldierker@dipix.com
Investor relations:
Tarquin Group Inc.
Donald Gibbs, CEO
613-236-3334
dgibbs@tarquingroup.com