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Recently Arla Foods, a farmer-owned global dairy company with headquarters in Denmark 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. Its director, Carsten Nøkleby, has been leading the effort at Arla Foods and several other large end user organizations.
The project has fully met the overall objectives of improved return on assets and shortened time-to-market. It also provides the structure required to reach higher levels of agility. Implementations should be as complete as possible. According to Mr. Svendsen, "If you only go 80 percent, you only get 20 percent of the benefits." Arla Foods wants to educate other users about the potential of the standard. The more suppliers sign up, the larger the choice of compliant equipment for users, and the more benefits all parties can obtain.
"Industrie 4.0" is already taking off at Arla Foods," according to Mr. Svendsen. PackML is a form of modular automation and can serve as example for the chemical and life science industries.
Further development of the PackML standard is under way in the packaging working group of OMAC. Equipment safety is not covered in the current standard or currently being worked on. Also the interfaces with other MES/MOM functions could use additional work. ARC Advisory Group predicts that more attention for quality-related parameters could also be beneficial.
ARC believes that all manufacturing industries that use packaging equipment could increase competitiveness and profitability by adopting the PackML standard and the current and future common guidelines established by P&G, Arla Foods, and OMAC.
The Arla Foods best practice documentation package is available from Carsten Nøkleby at SESAM-world.
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Keywords: Arla Foods, SESAM-world, Packaging Machine Integration, PackML, ISA-88, OMAC, Benefits, Design and Integration Time, Time-To-Market, Agility, Industrie 4.0, Industrial IoT, IIoT.