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7 Tips to get More out of Your Dansensor CheckMate 3
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7 Tips to get More out of Your Dansensor CheckMate 3
MOCON Europe's Dansensor
® CheckMate 3 gives you rapid and accurate measurements of headspace gas. However, to help you get even more out of your Dansensor CheckMate 3 we asked three of our experts to pass on their top snippets of advice: Sales Manager Morten Torngaard, Area Sales Manager Tony Johansen and Service Technician Alexander Münch. Here are their easy-to-follow hints and tips.
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Morten Torngaard
Sales Manager
MOCON Europe A/S |
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Alexander Münch
Technical Service
MOCON GmbH |
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Tony Johansen
Area Sales Manager
MOCON Europe A/S |
1. Save time by cloning your Dansensor CheckMate 3
It is very straightforward to make a clone or ‘identical twin’ of your existing Dansensor CheckMate 3. This can be useful if you are sending the machine for repair or recalibration and you have been given a replacement Dansensor CheckMate 3 on loan, or if you acquire additional machines to carry out the same tests on a number of lines. “There is no need to reinput all the settings into the second instrument and go through the entire installation procedure,” says Morten. “You simply have to insert a USB stick and follow the menu directions to download the settings and data, and then transfer the stick to the second machine and upload the information.” You can do this either for a particular function, for example data and settings relating to a given packaging line, or for the entire data set as a whole.
2. Don’t forget to back up!
We all know how important it is to back up our holiday snaps from our phone or camera to make sure they remain safe and do not get lost. The same applies to the information recorded by the Dansensor CheckMate 3. Tony recommends that you regularly transfer the internal memory to an external drive. “People often rely on the internal memory bank of the unit but they do not empty it regularly. The memory in the Dansensor CheckMate 3 is large, but it will eventually fill up so it is a good idea to empty it from time to time to a USB drive or a PC.” It is, of course, always sensible to back up the data when the machine is being sent for service or recalibration.
3. Enrich your information by using the database facility in the PC software
For any quality assurance process, information is king. The Dansensor CheckMate 3 software allows you to record a rich set of information for your internal and external quality assurance audits. “You can get much more out of the unit by loading key measurements into a database,” suggests Alexander. “For example you can configure the system to show how many packages of each product have been tested, where the test results are ok and where they are not, when the tests were carried out and by whom, and so on. It is highly versatile.” This kind of information can be extremely useful for quality auditing, for example. In addition, you can add notes to test results directly to the Dansensor CheckMate 3 via the touchscreen. “For example if you are doing a test and you accidentally push the needle all the way through the sample by accident, this will record a bad result. You can add a note to this effect and this result can then be ignored in the statistical analysis. This means that these ‘rogue’ results will not give a false picture of the test run.” Read a case study about
quality assurance.
4. Keep tabs on test history for you and your clients
Morten points out that it is often useful – and very straightforward – to go back through the history of test results. “If you have an incident on the packaging line or a recall from a customer, for example, it is simple to back trace the readings either through USB extraction or via the PC software.” This allows you to pinpoint the source of a problem quickly and efficiently.
5. Don’t forget to set up ‘user fields’ as a memory jogger!
Different lines or products often require their own particular measurements to be recorded in addition to the headspace gas analysis. These other measures could be, for example, the weight of the package or the particular flavour of the product. Morten points out that Dansensor CheckMate 3 can help you to remember what additional measurements need to be made on a particular line by using the five programmable ‘user fields’ on the instrument. This tells the machine to remind you to make the other relevant quality checks to ensure that all the key data is captured.
Watch our Dansensor CheckMate 3 video.
6. The barcode scanner option can make your life easier
Barcode scanners have made things easier in the supermarket for decades, and they can make your life easier as a Dansensor CheckMate 3 operator, suggests Alexander. By scanning the product code you automatically load details of the product into the Dansensor CheckMate 3, so the unit will know which parameters to set for that particular product. This will save you a lot of time. Read a blogpost about the
differences between manual and automatically testing.
7. Did you know that the Dansensor CheckMate 3 tests headspace gas change over time?
Morten points out that the Dansensor CheckMate 3 is a versatile instrument and that you can use it for more than just headspace testing of packages coming off the line. For example you can use the Dansensor CheckMate 3 for monitoring changes to the gas composition within a package over a period of time, information that can be important during trials. “If you want to know what is going on in a package that contains fresh vegetables that ‘breathe’, for example, you can insert the needle into the package and program the Dansensor CheckMate 3 to take a reading at given intervals – every hour, say – over a period of perhaps several days.”