Ask yourself this: what is the annualized labor cost to do this manually? Most literature feeders (vacuum or friction styles) will cost less than one full-time person for one year. This means a payback of less than one year.

If this ongoing production requires literature, it’s pretty easy to justify automatic feeding. This will also improve quality because you can add automatic sensing to verify the placement. Several companies offer either friction feeders or vacuum feeders that can do this. My company offers both.

In order to verify label flatness and integrity, a dark field illuminator should be used to highlight curling or wrinkles. These areas will appear as shadowed or dark in a machine vision image. Acceptable parameters can be based on process control methods utilizing thresholds set for maximum number of pixels.

In addition, a machine vision system can inspect for proper label positioning, proper label content, and color.