As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression. In the packaging world, flexible packaging is considered by many to be the optimal way for a company to put its best foot forward.
You’ve worked hard to grow your business, starting out as a small company where you packed a few boxes per day to growing into one that requires packing a few boxes per second. While you’ve been able to keep up with the busy pace of change, you’re wondering, “how long can I keep this up?”
Packaging companies are operating in a rapidly and dramatically changing economy. The landscape is increasingly digital, requiring new ways to make transactions and position products online.
Typically, we think of packaging machine safety in terms of hard wiring, e-stops, guarding, lock out/tag out and regulatory compliance. Those are important considerations, of course, but today’s networked safety technologies can achieve substantial increases in productivity.
End-of-line packaging using robotic pick-and-place is gaining acceptance as the go-to packaging system for the pharmaceutical and medical device industries — and the reasons are clear.
In packaging plants across the world, compressed air systems create significant energy waste. Pinhole leaks in air lines, sticky valves and other inefficiencies cost huge consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufactures and small contract packagers alike substantial amounts of money.
As a longtime supplier of flexible packaging machinery, I have had the unique opportunity to work with a number of companies to help them solve their evolving packaging challenges and continue to evolve their packaging— from large companies to a growing number of entrepreneurial startups.
As automation technologies progress, there are more opportunities for machinery to respond directly to input from human operators. This is why a good human-machine interface (HMI) is extremely important.
Optimizing a packaging line is a journey. And there are many variables to consider in the quest. If one machine or component isn’t working, it can wreak havoc on your entire line — with labor costs, downtime and of course finding the root of the issue.
Five students received $4,000 scholarships from the 2019 Fall PMMI Scholarship in Memorial of Claude S. Breeden, Glenn Davis and Art Schaefer, according to PMMI, The Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies.