Beverage

Passing data horizontally from processing to packaging

Treating processing and packaging as disjointed tasks hurts efficiency and retards speed to market. New views of controls and integration could bring the two closer together.

August 31, 2004

Leaders (UNIVERSAL TAXONOMY PFW): Page 442

Dairy

Drive Integration with Standards

As companies find many reasons to integrate data from process manufacturing and packaging with each other and with the rest of the company’s business applications, engineers are turning to standards and models from the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society (ISA), OMAC Packaging Workgroup and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for help.

August 31, 2004

Beverage

Partnership Breaks Manufacturing Barriers (sidebar)

Recently OMAC Users Group announced that it would like to work with the World Batch Forum committee on the S88 standard in order to achieve greater interoperability between batch processing systems and packaging systems.

August 31, 2004

Prepared & Canned Foods

Pack Expo visits lead to purchases

Representatives from both a Heinz division and a well known California winery both found the servo-based equipment they needed at Pack Expo International 2002.

August 31, 2004

Beverage

RFID tags becoming easier to read

On the other hand, return on investment for packagers will remain invisible for the near term. Now Wal-Mart softens stance on deadlines.

August 31, 2004

Beverage

RFID tags becoming easier to read

On the other hand, return on investment for packagers will remain invisible for the near term. Now Wal-Mart softens stance on deadlines.

August 31, 2004

Beverage

Four elected to Packaging Hall of Fame

Dr. Raymond Bourque, Audrey Marsh King, Stanley Kopecky, and Lawrence Starr will be inducted into the Packaging Hall of Fame during a November 7 awards reception at the Hyatt McCormick Hotel in Chicago. The ceremony will be held in conjunction with Pack Expo International 2004, sponsored by the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute.

July 31, 2004

Beverage

Training for mechanics, technicians, engineers

Worth noting are upcoming training opportunities and newly developed resources for automation professionals and industrial maintenance mechanics.

July 31, 2004

Beverage

OMAC/WBF update

Ongoing efforts to harmonize the standards being developed by the OMAC Packaging Workgroup and the World Batch Forum took a significant step forward at an August 17-18 meeting at Pfizer’s Peapack, NJ, facility.

July 31, 2004

Beverage

New PEN bottles in Denmark

Danish Brewery Group (DBG) has launched its Royal Pilsner and Royal Classic beers in new refillable 38-cL bottles of polyethylene napthalate (PEN), made by Rexam Petainer in Lidköping, Sweden.

July 31, 2004

Beverage

Closure energizes Olay vitamins

Consumer convenience is behind Pharmavite LLC’s use of Weatherchem’s NutraFlapper® closure for an Olay-brand vitamin supplement line introduced in August ’03.

July 31, 2004

Conveying & Product Handling

Water bottled in Kuwait has U.S. flavor

A portable bottling line housed in a 20’x8’x81¼2’ container is quenching the thirst of troops and personnel in Kuwait City, Kuwait. Started up in fall 2003, the 25 bpm self-contained line provides 1.5-L bottled water on-demand for the Army & Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) troops and support personnel, according to AAFES Food and Theatre program manager Tom Wilson.

July 31, 2004

Inspection, Sorting & Weighing

Cognex: powerful inspection tools for flexible packaging

Cognex machine vision systems locate distorted patterns that are difficult to recognize.

July 31, 2004