We started the year by setting the goals for the year ahead, and the increasingly important area of unique product tracking proved to be the cornerstone of our goals.

The major project of the past few years was serialization for the pharmaceutical industry. Our staff worked hard on enabling our partners to join on time and smoothly the EU’s pharmaceutical tracking system. Our serialization modules and the development of a drugs registration and tracking software environment has been successful, and during the preparation for the EU FMD (Falsified Medicines Directive) entered into force on February 9 we have gained serious experience in Track&Trace.

Accordingly, at the joint MACH-TECH and INDUSTRY DAYS trade show held this spring our main goal was to present unique product identification. At our booth, representatives from many sectors(agriculture, food, parts manufacturing, etc.) visited us, since they recognized that unique product tracking makes their businesses easier to handle. At the same time, the number of areas where it is a legal requirement to track not only the shipments but also the entire lifecycle of individual products is constantly increasing. As part of our commitment to product identification, we exhibited at the EXPO our own developed Masterprint PharmaJet Print&Check TE, which is a high speed serialization station providing coding, checking and validation functions.

Tracking products, whether it is expensive champagne or a special sapling, is similar to identifying medicines. The products themselves must be supplied with unique codes generated under digitally controlled conditions, so that these IDs can be retrieved in a matter of seconds later.

Our product identification solutions help businesses and consumers alike, since product tracking will only allow high quality and original products to pass through to the consumers. There are several other advantages to product identification: it helps conformity to the increasingly stringent legislation and preserving brand prestige by filtering out fake products. It also makes corporate processes more transparent and enables quick action in case of anomalies (e.g. product recall). Proper markup and up-to-date database – this is ho we could summarize what our tracking systems exactly provide.

We also showcased at the above-mentioned trade fair the Limitronic COLOR digital cardboard printer and started to resell this year the products of this well-established Spanish manufacturer. High-quality coders of the Limitag family can place on packaging vivid, contrasting, lifelike labels and decoration, and the result is almost artistic. A good example of an extreme situation is that fish packaging carton boxes are easily labeled even aboard a fishing boat.

Meeting of the most varied customer demands is our constant task, of course. Such a job was the aesthetic, cost-effective and durable marking on polystyrene bales. One of the requirements was that the ink used shall not damage the bale surface and the existing drive system does not need significant modification. With the automatic ink roller marker previously used, variable data labelling was not possible, so we decided to use the premium category Matthews large character inkjet coder, which perfectly fits into the manufacturing process. The captions can be placed on the bales in several colors and rapid switching between colors is also supported. By the way, depending on the settings and size of the label, the new equipment can mark a bale for between HUF1.3 and HUF1.5.

At the end of the year, we held an open two-day professional event about unique product identification entitled: MASTERPRINT – ZEBRA OPEN HOUSE 4.0. We organized this event jointly with IBCS Hungary Kft., one of the domestic distributors of Zebra printers.

Our goal was to get a closer look at the serialization-related manufacturer requirements and to show what hardware and software solutions we can offer.

We demonstrated to our guests coming from a wide variety of backgrounds how we can apply a perfectly secure unique identifier on virtually any surface.

The venue of the event was our center in Iváncsa, so the participants could get personalized information on the design, manufacture, commissioning and professional monitoring of our product tracking systems, and they could visit our exhibited serialization stations as well.

Finally, a good news: the Masterprint logo has become a registered EU trademark. The legal protection for the color trademark of our company is valid in all EU countries.

We would like to thank our customers, supplier partners and colleagues for their cooperation throughout the year, and we wish them all a happy holiday and a successful, happy New Year!