What I'm expecting at PackExpo

It's time for many of us to be off to this year's PackExpo in Las Vegas. I'm sure that many exhibitors are concerned about the payback from a trade show in this economy and many end users are fretting about not attending due to travel restrictions. But perhaps this will be an opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade. Here's what I expect.

The quality of end users in attendance is going to be higher than normal. The aisles won't be clogged with junior engineers and technicians sent to PackExpo as an educational experience. End users don't like sending folks to vacation spots like Vegas in good times and certainly won't like it more in hard times. They'd rather send the geeky folks to Chicago in January or Houston in July. It's different though for the golf set in the front office. They'll go to Vegas, particularly if they have some projects in mind.

This can be good for everyone. There will be more time for real discussions and negotiations on real projects. And there are real projects out there. Many companies don't want to expend the effort to find and retrain employees when the economy comes back and many others continue to be scared away from hiring due to immigration issues. These companies want to automate, and they know that they can't wait for the economy to recover or they will miss the upswing in sales. They need to automate now.

My guess is that the best automation equipment won't be on display this year. The European's won't be shipping over big booths and the North Americans may not have their best stuff in the pipeline to divert to a trade show. But, there will be a huge emphasis on robotics. Use caution with all of the robotic upstarts that will be exhibiting this year. Robotics is a non-trivial exercise. If this is the first year that a company is showing robotic solutions, I'd look, but then move on to someone with more experience.

The emphasis on education and students will be way down this year due to economic conditions and the fact that many of the educational institutions are closer to Chicago than to Vegas. It's still an important area, so I'm going to be looking for what's going on in that area.

OMAC will be in Vegas, but what impact will they continue to have? I understand that the Automation Federation is being impacted by the economy like the rest of us. But is now the time to switch to a paid membership model? To me that makes no more sense than raising taxes in a recession. I'll be stopping by their booth and meeting to see how things are going.

Finally, my son, an experienced machine tool field service engineer is joining me in Vegas this year. I'll be interested in his observations on how the packaging industry has been able to apply the computer technology that the CNC industry has used for so long. He's open to considering field service roles in the packaging industry, so if you have an opening in preparation for the coming upsurge, let us know.

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Comments I agree with your article, however, wanted to share a different viewpoint on "the types of automation on display". Various trade show experts and economic webinars indicate that strong companies should not cut marketing/development budgets during recessions as they will be poised for the come back. Relative to innovation, our company has continued to innovate and we will be debuting a dramatically different machine, the ElastiTag(r) Applicator, for automatically applying ElastiTag(r) hang tags onto bottles, cans, or cylinders at speeds up to 450 ppm. Stop by our booth C2600 and see this machine in action, I believe you will be impressed. Posted by: Theresa Lashyro on September 29, 2009 Thanks for your early thoughts Keith. The show was successful. Our company, which manufactures low profile conveyors for the packaging industry, enjoyed many high quality leads. With this show your location was important. We did very well in the Central Hall, but I heard the South was a bit slower. Also there are advantages to being members of PMMI which we are, so the cost was lower and there were zero drayage costs. So companies brought as uch machinery and equipment they could which was nice to see. Posted by: Chris Round on October 28, 2009 Post a comment (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) Name: Email Address: URL: Remember personal info? Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style) Type the word 'packaging' (required):