That was the word from head engineers at General Mills, Nabisco, Procter & Gamble, Hershey Foods and Anheuser-Busch who gathered together in Las Vegas during the recent Pack Expo Las Vegas show.
The meeting, co-sponsored by Mannesmann Rexroth's Indramat Div., ARC Advisory Group and Packaging World was attended by engineers from 28 machinery builders and 41 controls suppliers.
Several panelists said that many packaging machinery OEMs remain too mechanically oriented, lacking software expertise to wring maximum performance out of today's controls technologies. It's a problem that plagues end-users and OEMs equally, said Nabisco's Don Boyle: "We need people who understand both sides [mechanical and software engineering], and we need them dramatically."
Indeed, engineers at Hershey, P&G and Nabisco a stressed that often, state-of-the-art motion controls are simply grafted onto existing machine designs.
"We would like a 'white sheet' design, not simply replacing standard motors with servo controls," said Bob Kelley of General Mills.
The meeting may lead to a working group for packaging motion control under the auspices of the OMAC group (Open Modular Architecture Controls). Full coverage of the meeting will be published in an upcoming issue of Packaging World.
