Promat observations: Can packaging learn from material handling?

Just returned from Promat, the international exhibition of the Material Handling Industry of America held in McCormick Place. With more warehouses doing order fulfillment or repacking, warehouses are beginning to look more like packaging operations and several packaging machines were being exhibited for just those proposes. Warehouses are also being packed full of high tech machinery, controls, motion and IT products.

The show itself was refreshing. Promat didn't have the long taxi lines and shoulder to shoulder crowds that come with PackExpo. Two and a half days was plenty of time to see the entire show and to stop and chat with vendors that had something interesting to offer. I felt that I was really able to get a sense of the industry and do justice to the show.

In future posts, I'll discuss in more detail some of the technologies I observed and how they might be applied in packaging: things such as radio frequency sensors and operator interfaces; linear motors; single and mult-axis servo controlled chain hoists; highly distributed controls with drive, motion and logic functions in a single device; and hydrogen fuel cells for fork lift trucks.

One general observation that I made was that the exhibitors were generally not focusing attention upon whose controls they used or upon the underlying technologies they employed. This is contrasted to the packaging shows of recent years with the signs "Ethernet Here", "We Support OMAC Packaging Workgroup", "Servo-Enabled", and "We do Rockwell / Siemens / Elau / Bosch / etc.".

This is not to say, however, that world-class controls weren't being displayed at Promat. To the contrary, some very sophisticated systems were in evidence with sophisticated robotics; coordinated multi-axis motion control; device, cell and enterprise networking; RF-enabled control and data-collection; high tech weighing, gauging and inspection; on-line coding, printing and scanning; and sophisticated plant and enterprise level information systems with performance dashboards.

These systems were implemented with equipment from the who's-who list of global technology providers, but with a much larger presence proportionally of European and Japanese suppliers than one might expect to see at Pack Expo. I asked several folks why that was. This is what they told me:

Unlike in packaging, most customers don't care who the controls supplier is and leave that decision to the machine builder.

European controls suppliers are better at doing sophisticated, high accuracy motion and positioning.

Warehousing and fulfillment operations don't have the engineering staffs that manufacturers have, so there is no one to ask the questions about the controls.

A different level (higher) of management is making the purchasing decisions in the warehousing operations vs. the manufacturing operations.

Manufacturing operations are more demanding on the equipment and therefore require more maintenance.

The manufacturing environment is harsher than the order fulfillment or warehousing environment, and therefore there is less maintenance.

Lots of the controls in the warehousing systems are PC based and networked, and therefore are more conducive to remote troubleshooting. Suppliers troubleshoot their customers' systems over the Internet or phone lines.

Adding PLC's to the system design doesn't add any value.

Controls suppliers don't understand the sophisticated software requirements for order fulfillment, warehousing and distribution.

Controls and information must be highly integrated in the warehouse.

Customers have virtually no one to do maintenance, so they don't care about the underlying technology and rely on the supplier to provide the maintenance – sometimes with a supplier technician resident on site.

Warehousing and fulfillment systems are more frequently provided turn-key than are packaging or manufacturing systems.

Does this indicate a situation where more is less? Where the more people there are in the decision making and support roles, the more complex and expensive the systems become with no gain in functionality?

On the other hand, those folks in manufacturing and packaging have had a lot more years of experience at buying sophisticated technology. They know what can, and frequently does, go wrong. They have been to the trustee auctions to buy back the documentation for their own system when the supplier goes belly-up. They have tried to add on, enhance or update an obsolete system that was built around proprietary technology. They know that the useful life of a system may be longer than the life of the company or division that supplied it or of the employment of the people who designed and understand it.

Which is the better approach: to let the vendor make all of the decisions or to have the customer specify how he wants the equipment to be outfitted and controlled?

Personally, I could encourage a "tweener" as a colleague of mine would put it. I am ok with the vendor's choice of best of breed technology for his applications; but only when the components of the technology are built around international, open standards and arrangements are in place for full disclosure of the system design details. It would be a value-adding proposition for an industry trade group to specify how this might be accomplished. What do you think? I'd like to hear from you.

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