Packaging in times of Industry 4.0

Ele­vat­ing pack­ag­ing lines to the intel­li­gence lev­els promised by Indus­try 4.0, Piab is intro­duc­ing piS­MART ver­sions of its most advanced vac­u­um tech­nol­o­gy prod­ucts. Focused on max­imised pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and ener­gy-effi­cien­cy, piS­MART vac­u­um equip­ment places new cloud-based analy­sis tools in the hands of operators.
For the pack­ag­ing indus­try this means that large amounts of out­put data regard­ing, for instance, vac­u­um lev­el changes can be col­lect­ed and com­pared with data eas­i­ly accessed from the cloud, offer­ing high­ly intel­li­gent Leak­age Warn­ing sys­tems etc. Sim­i­lar­ly, cycle count­ing fea­tures can reveal if the num­ber of “picks per minute” is drop­ping over time, poten­tial­ly indi­cat­ing per­for­mance issues relat­ing to a build-up of dirt or blocked filters.
Piab’s adop­tion of the gener­ic and field­bus-inde­pen­dent IO-Link is an impor­tant key to the inter­op­er­abil­i­ty required in Indus­try 4.0 pro­cess­ing units. IO-Link is avail­able in piCOM­PACT, the com­pa­ny’s flag­ship all-in-one vac­u­um ejec­tor series, which is also the first to be offered with the new piS­MART fea­ture. Oth­er high-end vac­u­um equip­ment used for pack­ag­ing and pal­letis­ing will fol­low this lead. The com­pa­ny also plans to extend the piS­MART trans­for­ma­tion to include con­vey­ors and lift­ing sys­tems, ele­vat­ing also these to the unprece­dent­ed lev­els of opti­mi­sa­tion, effi­cien­cy and user-friend­li­ness char­ac­ter­is­ing Indus­try 4.0 factories.