A pioneer in manufacturing and packaging technology and solutions, Acquire Automation ensures brand protection for its clients. Based out of Fishers, Indiana, the company’s team of passionate and experienced staff takes pride in engineering specialized manufacturing and packaging vision solutions.
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In its 30,000 square foot facility, the staff work together to come up with solutions for a variety of industries including consumer goods, food and beverage, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and more.
Offering services such as label and ID inspection, product and packaging inspection, and a wide array of software platforms, Acquire Automation continues to ensure it implements high-tech solutions while keeping in mind manufacturing costs, safety and quality. The company’s innovative equipment ensures its clients’ products maintain the highest levels of quality, consistency and brand imaging.
Prism, for example, described on its website as the company’s “flagship machine vision platform,” identifies and rejects any nonconforming products, ensuring quality and helping end users prevent a possible product hold or recall. Able to be fitted into customers’ existing manufacturing processes, Prism is appropriate for nearly any packaging or manufacturing sector, including those regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
On the other end of the spectrum but equally as important to the team are the solutions provided by Acquire to the web and film industries. To ensure consistent packaging and product quality, the company’s web and film inspection solutions are designed to continuously inspect raw product as it is processed, as well as to inspect “print quality and verification on the web at the point of printing to limit scrap, rework and recall issues,” says the company’s website. Acquire works with OneBoxVision, its “exclusive North American partner for web and film inspection,” using high resolution line-scan camera technology and intense LED lighting to detect issues including burns, scratches and thin material.
As it is critical for any company to maintain its brand quality and image, Acquire Automation offers a valuable solution to its customers. Its offerings enable them to achieve 100 percent verification without the risk of human error. With its 3D Vision Inspection process, customers can trust that the volumes and dimensions for their products, as well as all aspects of their packaging and labeling, are consistent. Acquire’s solutions can capture batch/count data and metrics, offer real-time alarms and image collection, provide batch or daily logs as needed, and enforce user authentication, as is critical in most production sites.
With eight locations total, including one major hub and seven more remote offices, Acquire Automation employs 130 individuals and enjoys annual revenue of approximately $20 million. Each of the company’s employees understands the importance of embracing technology and its Robotic Guidance offering is a prime example of this focus.
As the company’s website describes, “The use of Acquire’s robotic guidance systems ensures increased quality control, safety, and optimal performance at the speed required to meet [the customer’s] goals. In order to effectively pick and place or assemble products, a robot must know the position, orientation, and status of each product.” Vision-guided robotics systems aren’t necessary for every application, but can be essential for situations where, for example, the location of a part is otherwise unknown. Acquire’s staff will partner with customers to assess their current systems and needs and deliver the best guidance system to meet those needs.
Reaching new customers is, of course, a key part of Acquire Automation’s plans for growth. Exhibiting its new Q Series LabelQ Tabletop System this past June in at MDM East in New York enabled Acquire to bring its innovative solutions to a pool of new prospective clients. Displaying this user-friendly interface on a more personal level allowed the opportunity to highlight the product’s PDF artwork import feature, designed to save customers valuable time. Instead of having to train the system with an already printed label image, the artwork can easily be imported to begin production immediately.
LabelQ was designed to inspect labels up to four by six inches in size and can reject incorrect, incomplete or unreadable labels before they are applied to the packaging. It was built to be compatible with Zebra’s Xi4 and ZT600 series printers and includes OCR (optical character recognition) and barcode verification.
The company also exhibited at the NPE Show in Orlando this past May, where for every badge scanned at its booth Acquire Automation donated $1 to FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization that inspires young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators. Donating a total of $500 to the organization from this event alone shows how Acquire is giving back to propel the students and leaders of our future.
What separates Acquire from the competition is its ability to adapt and evolve with industry developments. At present, the company is celebrating the release of six new machines, with four being specifically designed for the food and beverage sector and two for the medical/pharmaceutical field.
Coupled with its technological prowess is a supportive and engaging company culture, as evidenced by employee reviews from glassdoor.com, in which the company is described as fun and challenging, with a “fantastic” and “engaged” leadership team.
Along with protecting its customers as well as the eventual end users of the produced item, Acquire Automation strives to protect the environment. The company aims to reduce waste at every turn in its own processes. And, of course, Acquire’s offerings themselves help to prevent packaging and labeling defects which would be certain to end up in the garbage.
Robotics and automation systems may no longer represent the future, they are becoming ubiquitous in the manufacturing and packaging sectors – yet leading automation companies are still finding ways to innovate and drive the industry forward. Acquire Automation refuses to rest on its laurels, knowing that as new processes come to fruition, new systems and solutions will be needed to ensure those processes run as they should. The company takes its leading-edge technology, the people who develop it, and the users who depend on it seriously. This company and its many advanced solutions help protect our future by streamlining production today.
