This article delves into the innovative application of industrial scanning solutions in the complex environment of furniture manufacturing. Through a practical case study of China's top custom furniture brand, Suofeiya Home, this article demonstrates how a customized industrial barcode recognition system overcomes data collection challenges arising from product diversity, providing a comprehensive optimization solution for the digitization and transparent management of production processes.

User Background

As one of China's top furniture brands, Suofeiya Home is renowned for producing exquisite and customizable furniture. Suofeiya Home combines modern design with practical aesthetics to meet various customer needs. The company focuses on wardrobes, cabinets, and other storage solutions. With its emphasis on creativity, quality, and eco-friendly concepts, the brand is widely popular in China, creating stylish and practical living spaces for consumers.

Challenges

In its custom furniture production process, there is a need to collect QR codes from the edges of furniture panels and correlate them with various process variables (such as temperature, pressure, speed) of the manufacturing equipment to achieve fine-grained management. However, due to the product diversity brought by custom production, automatic reading of QR codes faces challenges such as wide production lines, barcode occlusion, and reading on reflective surface materials

• Wide scanning range: Due to varying panel sizes, the production line width can reach 1.5 meters.
• Barcode occlusion: During the edge banding process, the internal structure of small-sized panels may partially or completely obscure the QR codes on the panels.
• Reflective surface materials: The various surface materials of the panels, such as their glossy, matte, or metallic finishes, may have different reflective properties.

By implementing a customized furniture production line data collection system, Suofeiya Home achieved real-time collection and analysis of production data, significantly improving production efficiency and data management capabilities. The system helps reduce production costs and enhances the stability of product quality.

• Improve production efficiency: Reduce manual scanning and data entry time, decrease production line downtime, and increase overall productivity, thereby enhancing production efficiency.
• Reduce production costs: Minimize manual labor requirements, lower labor costs, and prevent material waste and rework caused by human errors.
• Enhance data management: Through real-time data collection during the production process, provide accurate and timely information to the production management system, enabling customers to better understand production status.

Suofeiya Home adopted a customized multi-device collaborative scanning solution:

• Networked deployment of multiple devices: A networked configuration of four SEUIC X4 industrial fixed barcode scanners was adopted to work collaboratively. One device was deployed at the panel entry point, specifically addressing the issue of small panels' barcodes being easily occluded; the other three were arranged along the production line. With each device having a 60-centimeter field of view, they seamlessly covered the entire 1.5-meter-wide production line, ensuring no scanning blind spots.
• Targeted anti-reflection treatment: By adjusting and equipping the scanning devices with polarizing lenses, the interference from reflected light caused by the panels' various glossy, matte, or metallic surfaces was effectively filtered out, ensuring successful read rates on complex surface materials.