Adco Manufacturing, Sanger, Calif., makes hand and auto-load cartoners, carton formers, sleevers and other packaging machines . They also make decisions about the future direction of the packaging industry. As Adco sees it, that future involves the triumvirate of automation, standards and connectivity.

Colin Warnes, mechanical engineering manager for Adco, notes that the company prides itself on building machines for a wide range of needs. But the value proposition behind these linked concepts seems clear and compelling, and Adco has acted on it.

“All of our upper-end machines incorporate EtherNet/IP, for our own communication between the HMIs (human-machine interfaces) and the PLCs (programmable logic controllers), occasionally some positional I/O (input/output points),” notes Kevin Gilpin, Adco’s electrical engineering manager. Ethernet’s speed and bandwith enables this communication, letting needed data about each connected point flow upward while still allowing operating instructions to flow to the machines—an advance over fieldbus technologies that have previously played such a vital part in automation. The advantages in terms of reduced downtime and greater operational efficiency are manifold. As noted by Robb Clarke, Ph.D., an associate professor at Michigan State University’s School of Packaging who has been involved with packaging for decades, “The more information you have, the more agile you can be.”

Putting a real-world face on these advantages, Gilpin observes, “For one thing, it allows someone to sit in their office and troubleshoot without having to drag a laptop down to the plant floor and connect up. This not only saves you time and money, but in practice, it means that a lot more data is available.”

It is also a potential benefit for the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) as well. “With remote access, I can go online and troubleshoot a customer’s machine. This is quicker and cheaper for both of us than sending someone out on a service call.”

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Sounds like a win-win proposition, one that has received its fair share of ink in trade magazines as well as OEM and automation vendor press releases. Is it catching on? “No it’s not, unfortunately,” says Gilpin. “Most customers really don’t want outsiders in their network. We’ve espoused the idea of remote maintenance for a long time, but most corporate IT (information technology) departments still won’t have anything to do with it.”

Granted, a somewhat larger number of companies are performing remote diagnostics and preventive maintenance on their own, within the secure confines of their IT department walls, but the potential of the technology remains underutilized. The same can be said for what is arguably the key standards initiative in packaging today: PackML.

“We build our machines to PackML guidelines,” says Gilpin, referring to the Packaging Machine Language developed by the OMAC Packaging Workgroup (OPW). OMAC, by the way, stands for the Organization for Machine Automation and Control. PackML sets out a common machine language for automated machines in order to ease the integration of equipment from different vendors, simplify customization, lower engineering and training costs, and reap other benefits that occur when packaging machines are easier to program, link and communicate with. The guidelines were adopted in August 2008 as part of the International Society of Automation’s ISA88 standard.

“PackML can make a great deal of machine-level data available to the customer’s higher-level systems,” Gilpin observes. That’s because the standardized terminology makes it easier to connect packaging machines to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other higher level systems, facilitating remote troubleshooting and allowing users to drill down to the level of detail they need. The result, typically, is greater machine and packaging-line efficiency.

“However, from my experience, few people are using it.” Gilpin’s colleague, Colin Warnes, largely concurs, saying a great deal depends on the size of the company. “At the large multinational companies, the engineers are on board with it, they love the concept. At the medium-sized companies, they usually know very little about it. It’s simply not on their radar yet. That’s something OPW is working to change.”

Warnes characterizes the current state of PackML implementation as a “which comes first, the chicken or the egg” proposition.

“You need the customers to request it for it to get implemented among the OEMs, but the OEMs also have to offer the standard on their machines, and to offer it for free.” Warnes, who has served on the OPW executive committee as a machine builder representative, sketches out what he says is an all too common scenario. “A customer requests that their new machine be PackML compliant. The customer decides they don’t want ...