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Desperately seeking standards

Head engineers from Anheuser-Busch, General Mills, Hershey Foods, Nabiscoand Procter & Gamble begin a dialogue with machinery and controls suppliers on motion control standards for packaging. Part one.

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In Oct. 19, at a meeting without precedent in the packaging field, head engineers from Anheuser-Busch, General Mills, Nabisco, Hershey Foods and Procter & Gamble spent three-and-a-half hours articulating their packaging controls needs. In the audience: a capacity crowd of more than 100 people from 19 packaging machinery builders and 28 controls suppliers-many of them managers or directors of engineering, marketing and operations, plus several company presidents.

The message was loud and clear: Consumer products manufacturers are straining their engineering resources trying to support and maintain multiple versions of controls technologies. A movement toward a controls standard in packaging-specifically for motion control-is desperately needed.

And the only way to reach such an elusive goal, everyone agreed, was to get everyone in a room together-end-users, machinery builders and controls suppliers-and put their cards face up on the table. By all accounts, this first meeting not only achieved that goal but was successful on a scale beyond anyone's expections.

This exclusive Packaging World report covers in detail what was discussed.

The October meeting was sponsored by Indramat (Hoffman Estates, IL), Open Modular Architecture Controls (OMAC) Users Group (Dedham, MA), ARC Advisory Group (Dedham, MA) and Packaging World magazine.

The focus was on motion control because motion controllers are typically more expensive, sophisticated and complicated to program than standard PLC or PC controllers that handle general machine logic. Plus, unlike PCs and PLCs, there are currently no standards for motion control hardware or software. Motion control is crucial because many of the advanced features on current machinery are enabled by motion controls. In the words of Keith Campbell, director, automation & integration for Hershey Foods, "The real heart and soul of packaging machinery is going to be motion control."

Emerging from the meeting at Pack Expo Las Vegas was a detailed picture of what these leading packagers seek from tomorrow's packaging machinery.

The ideal packaging machine, said the engineers, would be designed from the ground up with state-of-the-art motion control in mind.

"[Instead of] simply replacing standard motors with servos, we feel taking a completely new look at packaging equipment with motion control can produce much better designs," said General Mills' Robert Kelley, manager of electrical & control.

Hershey's Keith Campbell referred to this as the "third wave" of packaging machine design. "When machines are designed from the ground up, they'll be able to perform new package executions, [and they'll be] smaller, lighter, cheaper and more flexible."

Single controller wanted

These packagers also seek machinery with a single controller that would handle motion, logic and possibly other functions such as human-machine interface. Much of today's machinery relies on separate controllers for these functions.

"We don't need multiple controllers on the machine," Hershey's Campbell said. "A lot of times, the logic control is a secondary function [and can be incorporated as a] subset of motion [in a] hybrid controller."

For P&G's Robert Aleksa, corporate controls section head, a single controller represents an opportunity to integrate logic with motion into a single programming environment. "We don't want to be forced to [program] motion in a [PLC] logic [programming] environment and logic in a motion environment. [Mixing] logic and motion easily in the same environment is one of our key needs."

Also on the panelists' wish list: a standard motion control programming language and a standard networking protocol (for machine control and/or motion control).

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