Smart Card Packaging Process Control System

Abstract: The project focuses on the packaging process of the smart card manufacturing industry. The idea of the project concerns how to increase production packaging efficiency by introducing a control system. After taking an in-depth look at the current production environment, the following system goals were defined: packaging time reduction, cost reduction, decrease in human errors, and reducing the number of customer complaints. To achieve these goals, the thesis project was divided into the following tasks: discovering a feasible solution, actual system development, testing, and evaluation. The proposed system is based on hardware (i.e. barcode scanner, and barcode printer) integrated with customized control software. The barcode scanner acts as a bridge between the system and the production process by scanning a barcode printed on each product. The system prints the required information label for the product’s package according to the scanned product. This label is pasted on the product’s box and is used as a tracking tool during further production steps. The system is very flexible and suits any packaging model. Other functional properties maintained in the system include data security, product traceability, and real time production monitoring. Testing of the system was done in an actual production environment at an Oberthur Technologies manufacturing site. Two production lines were selected to test the system’s functionality, specifically the SIM card production packaging line and the Scratch card/ Bank Card production packaging line. The results obtained during the evaluation phase of the proposed system show that the proposed solution decreased the packaging processing time by (27.3%) over the previous values. Moreover, the resulting human error rate is close to (zero%).