Yesterday I was at the Packaging Automation Forum in Chicago. We had an excellent set of speakers, lots of good questions and great networking. The Forum is sponsored by Packaging World and Automation World. This was our third. Had you been there you would have heard practitioners talk about things they have actually done that worked. Several things I learned:
Develop a manufacturing / automation strategy (several discussed in gory detail how they used the ISA95 model and mapped it to their operations)
When specifying and procuring new systems, go back to the model / strategy and make sure it fits; and if not, figure out how to change to get one that fits or justify exception)
Do lifecycle cost analysis, not just purchase price; hold engineers and purchasing to lifecycle cost, not purchase price in evaluations
Think in terms of lines, not individual machines, such that the automation from the different machines fits together
Get involved with colleges and universities to help promote engineering as a profession
I was amazed and pleased at the adoption of ISA95. The ISA88.05 (Make2Pack) workshop and demo held on Monday was very well attended. The standards approach to automation was enthusiastically received and engineers were laying plans to follow up to see more demos and see how to specify and adopt the standards.
Watch for next year's edition. It will no doubt still be called the Packaging Automation Forum, but the information includes general machines and even batch processing--with a dose of MES thrown in to point out the importance of tying the automation to the enterprise.
10:34:38 AM 
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