Immediately following discussions with European trade associations and editors at the Interpack trade fair in Düsseldorf Germany 21 members of the Make2Pack group held a European working meeting on 28-29 April at member company ELAU’s headquarters in Marktheidenfeld outside Frankfurt am Main.

David Chappell Make2Pack Chair and Technology Section Manager for Procter & Gamble remarked that “this was our biggest most diverse attendance yet demonstrating keen interest from Ireland to Switzerland in what will become part of Europe’s IEC 61512 in addition to ISA S88 Part 5.”

Attendees included a cross-section of stakeholders including representatives from the German and U.S. packaging machinery associations leading machine builders from Germany and Italy and automation suppliers from across Europe.

Chappell stated that Make2Pack supported his company’s business objectives and urged attendees to get on board saying “there’s leading edge technology and there’s bleeding edge but those who ignore the trends are destined to encounter the blunt edge of technology. For our part we remain on target for completion of our draft report at the end of this year.”

Together the Make2Pack joint working group is coordinating implementation of ISA’s SP88 and SP95 standards with OMAC’s SP88-derived PackML™ state model and related Guidelines across continuous batch and discrete processes. Their specific intent is to develop ISA/ANSI standard S88 Part 5 and a corresponding IEC standard.

Progress on several fronts

After a review of how S88 architecture overlays packaging processes Chappell introduced Dr. Tobias Voigt of the Technical University of Munich who presented how the Weihenstephan standard had integrated PackML for the bottling industry.

Splitting into work groups the participants tackled definitions of a simple servo device procedural vs. coordination vs. basic control the applicability of the ISC 12.1 standard for defining tag names and state definition use definitions of unit and cell states and definitions of function names for equipment phases.

Attendees included Bosch Rexroth Group B&R Industrial Automation Corp. ELAU Enterprise Ireland GTI Process Nestlé the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute PFM Packaging Machinery Procter & Gamble ProLeiT Schneider Electric Siemens SL Controls Uhlmann Pac-Systems Technical University of Munich and VDMA.

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