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How to build better packaging lines by leveraging standards organizations

The Automation Conference, held in Chicago May 22-23, was characterized chiefly by two things: networking opportunities extraordinaire and great speakers.

The Automation Conference, held in Chicago May 22-23, was characterized chiefly by two things: networking opportunities extraordinaire and great speakers.

One of the keynote speakers was Paul Redwood, R&D equipment engineering manager at Church & Dwight, whose presentation was titled “Getting the most from your interaction with standards organizations.” Redwood is a relative newcomer to the OMAC Packaging Workgroup, but in pretty short order he’s come to understand the benefits that his company and others engaged in packaging would reap if a standard like PackML were more widely adopted and implemented. Redwood has also rolled up his sleeves where the PackML Committee work is concerned by heading up the PackLearn team. Here are some of Redwood’s tips and observations about standards, controls, automation, and the places where all three intersect.

• Anyone trying to drive standards through their organization needs a dose of encouragement because there are times when they are likely to find themselves quite bewildered.

• Get involved. Recently we held our first-ever public workshop at our Princeton, NJ, headquarters. It was a risk assessment workshop held in conjunction with PMMI. Fred Hayes of PMMI was key in setting it up, and Bruce Main from Design Safety Engineering helped deliver the training. A key part of that training was the PackSafe software tool, which really facilitates doing a risk assessment and gets you to the decision-making points very easily. So I recommend you look at that tool because it will help you get involved with standards organizations.

• Too many of us in the manufacturing sector have a broken relationship with standards organizations. We tend to reach out to them in a crisis. Or they reach out to us in a crisis. A better relationship with standards organizations would be a good thing. To use an automobile analogy, they are not a GPS. But they are a regulatory and technical compass, for both voluntary and mandatory standards. Why not make better use of this compass?

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