Antares Vision And Cognex Enter A Strategic Agreement

Antares Vision has entered a strategic partnership agreement with Cognex Europe for a joint development of inspection systems dedicated to track & trace and e-pedigree applications. Under this agreement, Antares and Cognex technical teams will cooperate to develop and market new, high performance reading stations required to implement the next generation of Track&Trace systems.
The new developments will take advantage of the most advanced Cognex camera platforms – renewed to be at the leading edge in the artificial vision technology – to implement innovative reading tasks related to the aggregation phase of Track & Trace. This means – for example - the ability to read several Datamatrix codes (over 100 simultaneously) even in difficult reading conditions such as in presence of fully wrapped bundles or in high speed applications.
The new solutions will be part of the ATS-Antares Tracking System, a complete suite of hardware and software to implement Traceability in accordance with the latest regulations in the pharmaceutical industry. ATS includes the widest range of serialization devices (over 7 different models) to print and check Datamatrix unique codes, and aggregation devices to build the parent-child relationship on board of packaging machines such as bundlers, case packers, palletizers. The ATS software modules include a plant manager to interface corporate ERPs, manage unique serial numbers and communication to the Ministry of Health database, a line manager to monitor in real time the production line by line, and a warehouse module to manage commissioning and decommissioning of aggregated units before shipment, once work orders are closed. ATS is already installed and in full production on over 250 production lines in Turkey (the first country to enforce complete Track & Trace regulations) and in Europe.
This agreement follows a long record of cooperation between Antares and Cognex on several large Track & Trace projects in the pharmaceutical industry. “We successfully cooperated with Cognex on several large projects related to Track&Trace. This agreement furthers Antares long-term vision of empowering the ATS system through leading edge technology, promoting an open architecture where the customer is able to choose from a wide range of line devices and can easily interface with several vendors’ platforms.” said Adriano Fusco, Antares Vision Marketing manager.
“Collaborating with Antares Vision dramatically broadens the market potential of our cameras in the pharmaceutical industry, and gives to our European partners access to the most performing Track & Trace platform. This agreement is particularly important as Track & Trace regulations are currently under enforcement by several governments in order to face drug counterfeiting” according to Olivier Féraille, Cognex Sales Manager South Europe.