As long as the machines went pocketa-pocketa-pocketa shift after shift and didn’t require too much more than scheduled maintenance, cases went out the door, happiness spread across the land, and plant managers were justly rewarded.
Boy, are those days gone. In case you haven’t noticed, packaging machines can no longer be viewed as mere capital assets that sit incommunicado on a plant floor. They’ve become intelligent assets connected to the enterprise along a real-time communications network. It’s the only way a consumer packaged goods company can maximize asset utilization and tame finished-goods inventory while still making sure that its products are plentiful when Mr. or Mrs. Smith hurries down Aisle 6 at Safeway, Wegmans, or Walmart.
At the same time that packaging machines have gone all cerebral on us, the people buying them have learned that overall manufacturing efficiency is best achieved when packaging and processing are as tightly integrated as possible. And that, dear reader, is why you hold this special Process2Packaging (P2P) supplement in your hands. PMMI, the producers of Pack Expo International 2010, understand how inextricably linked processing and packaging have become. So they have expanded the focus of Pack Expo International to include processing solutions. They even introduced a new exhibit area called The Processing Zone. They also engaged Packaging World and Automation World in a conversation about how we might produce a special editorial component leading up to Pack Expo that would cover the increasingly automated and integrated worlds of packaging and processing. Out of that conversation came this supplement.
