Most inspection systems do their first job well: they find defects. What they rarely do is tell you which roll the defect is on, where in that roll it sits, whether the roll should ship, and what the slitter should do about it. Roll Tagger and Roll Grader add exactly that, on top of any inspection system, from any vendor, without replacing a camera or retraining an operator.
Typical gaps we find on lines that already have inspection installed.
The system logs defects against a time or a line, not a roll ID. When a customer complains, nobody can prove which roll it was or what was in it.
Metre counts come from the inspection PC, not from the winder encoder, so positions are approximate and splices and rewinds throw them out.
Pass or fail is a judgement call made from a report, differently on each shift. The specification lives in people's heads.
Each line has its own PC, its own archive and its own rules. Nobody sees quality across the plant, and genealogy between lines is a spreadsheet.
Defect maps stay on the inspection PC. The slitter and rewinder run blind through the material that should have been cut out.
Review decisions are made and forgotten. The same defect gets argued over again next week.
Two products that sit alongside the inspection you already run.
A small device at the winder, slitter or unwind. It reads the encoder directly, carries the roll ID from the line controller or a scan, and binds every defect your system reports to a named roll at a true machine-direction position. Operator tags, splices and plant I/O are recorded on the same timeline. At the slitter it can stop or slow the machine on a defect it was told about upstream.
One server on the plant network. It takes the roll maps from every line, whatever inspection system produced them, and grades each roll against your product specification: pass, hold, downgrade or reject, with the reason. It queues the rolls that need a human look, plans the slit to recover good material, keeps the archive with genealogy from parent roll to customer roll, and learns from every reviewer decision.
Roll Grader reads from ImageFlow natively and from third-party systems through their database, export files or API. One hub over mixed-vendor lines.
Your cameras, lighting, recipes and operator screens stay exactly as they are. One Box reads the data the system already produces and never writes back to it.
| Question | Legacy inspection only | With Roll Tagger and Roll Grader |
|---|---|---|
| Which roll had this defect? | Work it out from timestamps | Named roll, true position, instantly |
| Should this roll ship? | Operator reads the report and decides | Graded automatically against the specification, reason recorded |
| What does the slitter do? | Runs blind | Stops or slows on flagged positions; slit plan recovers good material |
| Where did this customer roll come from? | Spreadsheet, if at all | Genealogy from parent roll to shipped roll, with every event on the way |
| How is quality across the plant? | One PC per line | One archive, one set of policies, every line and every vendor |
| Do we get better over time? | No | Every reviewer decision trains the grader |
A read-only adapter picks up defect records and images from your inspection system. ImageFlow lines connect natively; other systems through their database, export or API. Nothing on the inspection PC changes.
Installed at the winder, slitter or unwind. Connects to the encoder and to the PLC over OPC UA, MQTT or digital I/O. From this point every record carries a roll ID and a true position.
One server on the plant network. Load your product specifications as grading policies, set up the review queue and reports, and the archive starts building from the first roll.
Bring further lines into the same hub, whatever inspection runs on them. Licensing is perpetual, per site, line and device, so adding a line is a known cost.
Control stays on the line. If the hub is down, every line keeps inspecting and alarming; only grading waits.
The adapter never writes to your inspection system or changes its behaviour. Your vendor's warranty and support are untouched.
Commercial off-the-shelf hardware and an open system. No vendor lock-in on the hub.