Arla Foods Reduces Packaging Machine Integration Costs Using PackML

Arla Foods, a farmer-owned global dairy company with headquarters in Denmark, has made significant investments in technology to improve its operations. These include standardizing manufacturing execution system/manufacturing operations management (MES/MOM) applications and integrating these with business planning applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP). The company has acquired many new sites and this standardization effort has significantly reduced the time required to integrate a new site with the ERP.

The company recently tackled another area with potential for standardization: packaging machine integration. Arla Foods had as many packaging interfacing standards as machine vendors and considered the time investments required to design and interface machines excessive.

The PackML standard, based on ISA-88, has been available for several years, but required applied research by P&G and more recently Arla Foods to provide clear guidelines to make implementations simple and successful. The project created significant savings and added value. Arla Foods now wants to stimulate other users of packaging machines to apply PackML for the common benefit of users and machine vendors. PackML usage is currently rapidly expanding via the Danish Automation organization, SESAM-world, with over 200 members including both end-users and machine builders.

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Keywords: Arla Foods, SESAM-world, Packaging Machine Integration, PackML, OMAC, ISA-88, ARC Advisory Group.